For 12 months
When I first arrived in Florence for a three-month stay, my meaning of home shifted. One day I was walking around the city to get myself situated and ducked inside the Orsanmichele church. Initially, I didn’t know it was a church because of its rectangular shape and rather inconspicuous entrance. I made my way to the front of the church where a large, white tabernacle framing a painting of the...
The thing about mess is that it derails the already derailed mind. Mess gets everywhere, copulates with space and expands like a Bavarian’s stomach. Tidiness is concision, the opposite but mess, it has wings made of shit, and it has grand aspirations, to run like riverluts into every nook and cranny, leaving you ravaged. My place was an armpit because a workman was dismantling, excavating my...
By Mundy Walsh I was in Ireland last month helping my parents fix the flat roof of their shed. It was a cloudy day and I could see a field of corn behind the tall Beech hedge which separates us from our nearest neighbors—and their clothes line of souvenir tea-towels. We had to lift a section of the roof and repair some of the rafters. There was a long ladder on one side of the shed, which...
By Marisa Garreffa Many years ago, a friend sat me down. “Marisa, if you woke up tomorrow and couldn’t make theatre anymore, do you realise that people would still love you?” No. I did not know that, or believe it. How could I? Theatre was the only thing I loved about myself. Every other part I struggled with – the junkie, the trash-bag, the depressive, the girl who was “one of the boys” and...
By Lori Hetherington I’ve never been much of a movie buff. Don’t get me wrong: I like movies but I can never remember the title or the plot, not to mention the names of the actors. However, there is a film I saw on television once in the late 1990s that I have never forgotten. In that film, the protagonist, named Helen and played by Gwyneth Paltrow, lives two possible, parallel lives, spawned by...
Com-Solum By Amy Sarno A 36 year old African-American woman with braids. She sits in an office chair, tipping backwards. She’s chewing gum. In the background, there’s the sound of women’s voices. It sounds as though a woman with a strong Spanish accent is speaking very quickly sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes it might be a made-up combination of the two languages. Jasmine: ...
By Loredana Andrei Since childhood I was surrounded by only a few friends, but those few I had were very close to my heart. When I left my home country to move to Germany a few years ago, I knew my life was going to change completely; I knew that I will have to learn how to live without any friends around. Even so, I hoped to meet new people here, but it hadn’t been as easy as I thought. Not...
By Lorenzo Novani I woke to howling wind and all the hostility that it brings: the little door to the shelter rattling violently, snow fluttering through the sides, cold air reaching up to sting my face and leave me numb. I thought about my predicament. I was 1,345 meters above sea level on the collapsed dome of an extinct volcano, surrounded by snow, fog, and darkness, in freezing temperatures...
By Lee Foust For a fiction writer, one’s childhood grows plotted, thematic, and comes to reek of manipulated matter. The childhood recollection can be anything but honest, anything but benign. I frame my own in Gothic. There were monsters. No, not under the bed, but along the deserted streets of a lonely, countryish California suburb. Before cement sidewalks and Astroturf lawns. Darting, rumbling...
By David Orr My two year old son calls me ‘Daddy’, occasionally ‘Babbo’, and a few times a month, ‘Davide’. Of the three, ‘Davide’ is the most startling, as if he’s aged sixteen years in a sentence and turned into an ironic teenager. Also, my first name is David – Davide is what comes out the other end of an Italian pasta-press, flattened and exotic. Though he was born in Italy and we...
