Our Collection – The Short Story Project

Iran

The first time she heard of the Aal was from her grandmother. The story itself wasn’t particularly frightening, but the stench of scorched frankincense and stale opium rasping out of her withered throat with every word...

The Smell of a Baby

Miaad Banki

10 min

Israel

I was assigned to work with Guy at Bells. We were both freshmen. He was in a prestigious social sciences program that I’d also applied to. I got a 655 on the psychometric exam, which was...

Bells

Yam Traiber

13 min

Germany

‘Porta-Pat!’ comes in stereo from either side. They laugh. ‘Your turn!’ To get the beers in, they mean. They’re already drunk as twin skunks. They really mean it. Porta-Pat. Supposed to be my new nickname, they...

On a Saturday

Finn-Ole Heinrich

14 min

Germany

No matter whether I really ever said I had no desire to surround myself with nerds, hoarders, bon vivants, and pizza eaters, I can empathize with a good man who one day pays a visit to...

The Old Cable

Max Goldt

4 min

USA

After Guadalupe Nettel’s “Fungus” With my big toe, I pressed down on the bloated bulb of seaweed until a burst of salt air and ocean water popped out of its membrane. Amalia refused to do the...

Fungus

Mia Carrillo

5 min

Egypt

My name is Asser, and I’m not a little kid—I’m six years old! I’m a whole year older than my cousin Malika. Just a little while ago, we hid behind the curtain. Of course, we love...

Japanese Watches and Egyptian Cats

Ahmed Tharwat

1 min

USA

When I’m feeling down, I go for nighttime swims with the aquarium turtles. I was hired as a security guard because people keep trying to steal our very expensive penguins. In my opinion, the sea turtles...

Aquarium’s Most Wanted

Sophie Hoss

0 min

USA

The nodes were like beetles, their black metal bodies shining between the attendant’s fingers. “Just a pinch, dear,” he said, leaning in and fixing the nodes to my temples, measuring symmetry with my eyes and his....

The Fig Leaf

Benjamin Shane Evans

6 min

USA

The kid—they call him Spud—sees it while walking the mile to where he catches the school bus every morning except Thursdays when his mom pulls a shift at the school cafeteria and drives him there at...

For the Love of Goat

Clif Travers

14 min

USA

Clemens hated doctors. When he came of age in the late ‘80s, they invariably made him feel worse—even the ones whose off-the-cuff diagnoses and hair-trigger antibiotic prescriptions made him, physically, better. They’d ugly-eye his hacking coughs...

Face

Douglas Silver

30 min

USA

8:44 am Tuesday greets me with pale golden light, singing the song of the morning, the song of opportunity. I rise from my bed without using the snooze button even once, ready to meet the promise...

Cuddlebug

Jenna-Marie Warnecke

25 min

Israel

A pregnant woman lays naked in a bathtub filled with amber water. She has a serene yet intense expression, with her eyes slightly open and her head tilted back. The lighting is warm and moody. It...

By the Water with Friends

Danielle Zilberberg

7 min

Canada

When she woke in the morning there beside her was the boy she had dismissed the night before as far too ugly and ingratiating, and on the other side, even more of a surprise, the boy...

The Girl Who Planted Flowers

Sheila Heti

2 min

USA

I went running and tripped on a crack in the sidewalk. I broke my fall with my hand but also smashed my iPhone, which wasn’t in a protective case because the one I had didn’t fit...

And Even Higher

Todd Pitock

8 min

UK

3:34 am. She was awake. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the bedroom. She could make out every familiar feature. In recent months, this time had become too familiar to her. She no longer...

Nocturnal Yearnings

Naomi Nightingale

3 min

Argentina

On that day, she had returned home later than usual. A meeting that extended longer at the office, a coffee with a friend at El Martínez on Av. Corrientes, and an unexpected delay on the subway....

Chimi

Alfredo Sanz

2 min

USA

Passing Robitussin, my girlfriend guides the Bronco across the beach with her knee driving the wheel. Driving through night. Through black. She passes it to me. I take it, take some, pass it back. She takes...

NIGHTDRIVING

Robert Warf

9 min

Israel

The summer I fell in love with AI was also the summer I fell in love with N, and the two weren’t unrelated. Early that summer, a machine N had built kept popping up in my...

Perpetuum Mobile

Zohar Elmakias

4 min

Slovakia

She had been married for five years – and still nothing. Her relatives felt pity and compassion for her; it was not usual for women to be barren in her large family, where children had always...

A Child

Erika Olahová

5 min

Argentina

Six olives contain as many calories as a small steak. Could that be right? She’d read it out of the corner of her eye in a magazine belonging to a woman in a faded ski sweater...

A Centimetre or Two a Year

Matías Capelli

20 min

Israel

“Ana bahib al-bahar”, I love the sea, the girl said. They were walking, stumbling along on the sand, four children and one grown woman. Backs, shoulders and hands were laden with backpacks and bags, the woman’s...

Seeing them see the sea

Ilana Hammerman

8 min

Israel

When everything in the house is upside down and all mixed up, it means only one thing: we’ve got company. It doesn’t matter how many guests there are — one or thirty-one — before their arrival,...

Being Frosya Shneerson (Chapter 6)

Tasha Karluka

8 min

The Beretta Always Wins (A chapter from a novel)

Tunisia

The smell was stuck in my nose and wouldn’t go. Whenever I drew air into my lungs, the smell took over, and all the torture I went through that night came rushing back. Before emailing the...

The Beretta Always Wins (A chapter from a novel)

Kamal Riahi

4 min

Tunisia

Emerging from his plastic cave awash in filth, Crow “J” toddled unsteadily over to the paved road with sullen, terse gasps. The radiant disk was rising from the mouth of the earth as he advanced through...

One of Them

Aziz Jamal Yahyawi

2 min

Sudan

In front of me, I put a ream of white paper, a copper inkwell and a feather I snatched from my neighbour’s duck. I lit a candle and stuck it in the middle of the table....

Broca’s Area

Mohamed Hassan AL-Nahat

8 min

Mexico

The transfer began at two in the morning, while a northerly wind blustered furiously outside. Some of the prisoners didn’t even have time to dress before the Federal agents burst into their cells. Shoving and kicking,...

A Prison Out of the Movies

Fernanda Melchor

5 min

Spain

‘I’m sorry,’ says the girl. ‘You’re mistaken.’ I listen to her without batting an eyelid, nodding my head as if being mistaken were the most natural thing in the world. Because there’s no other explanation. I’ve...

The Woman in Green

Cristina Fernández Cubas

24 min

It Will All Be Over by Next Rosh Hashanah

Israel

An old woman cleans my house. She sends the money she earns to her children and grandchildren – maybe her great-grandchildren too. They all live in a nice house in some evergreen part of Europe, by...

It Will All Be Over by Next Rosh Hashanah

Vered Singer

8 min

Palestine

“It was a pitched battle…” – a description he had often read out to his classmates from history textbooks but never thought he would one day use as he had just done, speaking to his friend,...

The Battle of Tel el-Hawa

Asmaa al-Ghoul

8 min

Gaza

I grew up suddenly like a tree. Once I had a dream when I was five years old. This dream visited me again. I slept for ten minutes that night. It was hard. The medicine that...

The Nightmare (a chapter from a novel)

Abdalhadi Alijla

7 min

Mexico

“Evangelina Segunda, you have the beauty of Artemis: Venus herself fiercely envies the innocence of your smile” Sunday Magazine, Issue 54, El Dictamen (13 February, 1983) The centre of Veracruz is full of ghosts, my...

Everyone’s Favourite Blonde

Fernanda Melchor

8 min

Israel

Like at other periods of metaphysical ardor, at this time too, the body (that of a woman, to be sure) wasn’t taken very seriously. This may be why even the dockworkers in the port that day...

Madame Bovary from Neveh Tsedek

Nurit Zarchi

10 min

Syria

I learned of the character of drugs and the nature of poisons from an alchemist – an Arab alchemist from the outskirts of Baghdad who had come to work as a physician in the palace of...

The Veiled Man

Jan Dost

6 min

Egypt

You wanted me a slave bought and sold You wanted me in despair joyless. From the poem “Absent” by Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein. *** The distance between one floor and another was months and...

The Seventh Floor

Mohammed Salah Rajeh

3 min

Insurrection – A chapter from “The Gorilla”

Tunisia

About one o’clock in the afternoon. The wind is busy rolling along some beer-can that has been drained of its contents in the deserted street. A massive silence links the arch of the Sea Gate with...

Insurrection – A chapter from “The Gorilla”

Kamal Riahi

5 min

Israel

The day I moved from the city to the country my dog returned his spirit to the God who gave it. I do not know whether it was the shock of the move or just a...

Taqsim Hyena

Nir Soffer-Dudek

4 min

Israel

This city — this city is so fucking expensive that I can’t bear it. And it’s so fabulous that sometimes I can’t bear it. Expensive and horrible — that would be better. To enjoy it, you...

And Then — Nina Simone Began to Sing

Tasha Karluka

4 min

Tunisia

“I haven’t written a word for a year (…) I’ve tried to write. Every day I sit at the typewriter, but I can’t get started.” – J.D Salinger “What’s a director if he can’t engage in...

A Grainless Mill

Ziad Abd el-Qadir

6 min

Sweden

Sometime in June, my back started to itch. I thought I’d been bitten by a mosquito or some other insect. That’s how it felt. It was always worst when I’d been out running and worked up...

Getting Ahead

Jonas Karlsson

31 min

Israel

I had headed out to buy a pack of cigarettes and a few tomatoes, and there was a black shoe in the entrance to the building. A black shoe, just one, on the second tile beyond...

The Shoe

Hisham Naffa

5 min

USA

I watched his face, nutmeg brown from the sun and criss-crossed like alpaca tracks, grow paler by the day, a yellow hue to his beautiful eyes that the doctor said was because his liver was quitting...

The Lonely Magpie

Alan S. Falkingham

1 min

USA

That autumn we knocked down the old barn foundation I asked the man with the backhoe to dig a grave in the center of a huge patch of tiger lilies. This was in case Annie died...

Dogs Know Those Who Dig Graves

Sharon Roznik

1 min

USA

It’d been a year since the fire. In the months that followed the blaze people still talked about it, still tried to understand what happened, still gathered occasionally to stare into the remains like parishioners at...

The Fire

Megan Benjamin

1 min

USA

I wait, listening for your footfalls, heavy, weary from your work. The sun will rise soon. I have readied the water; warm for your bath, cold for your clothing. The latch clicks, then the floorboards protest...

Soap and Water

Sonrisa Holmes

1 min

India

Mr. and Mrs. Soundaryam ran Athithi Devo Bhava — a small joint in the city of Chennai. People from all walks of life crowded around the stall and business was quick, often rushed, with hardly a...

Red Curry

Anitha Padanattil

1 min

USA

In another world, Icarus ignored the sun. He soared through the air and relished in the ecstasy of flight. His arms were wings and he was the most glorious of birds. The sun became nothing more...

Fallen God

Madison Siwak

1 min

USA

“This song’s about you.” He leaned against the slick mahogany bar, watching a jazz trio perform Lady in Red. She glided past him and stood a few feet away, so as not to appear that she...

Medusa Wore Red or Testing the Waters

Stephanie Lewis

1 min

USA

Hot July, the taint of creosote. My brother sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of a dirty hand, leaving a brown smudge. Converse sneakers shifted, dragged. “Well? Go ‘head.” “Just a sec.” Steven Santilli’s sand...

Evel Knievel

Maribeth Mundell

1 min

USA

Running, through the vines and tree roots, encircling my legs, pulling me back to the Napalm Apocalypse. I hear the blades of the Huey just in the clearing ready to pick me up, I can’t move,...

Invisible

Jeannean Walker

1 min

USA

I peered out the passenger seat window of my mother’s car. She shifted from second to third gear. “You want to be committed; I’ll commit you!” she spewed while the car lurched forward. My sister laid...

My Sister

Hilary Sigismondi

1 min

Tunisia

Origin of the story: The story started by chance. It was Sunday evening and work that day hadn’t been too hard. Monday’s edition mostly comprised investigations, interviews and regional reports prepared in advance, and I often...

Baganda (A chapter from a novel)

Shukri al-Mabkhout

5 min

Morocco

The Imam’s words to me at the entrance to the mosque that night were strange and dramatic. He said that a pack of ferocious black cats had attacked the district and was destroying everything it came...

Black Cats

Samir Salmi

2 min

Tunisia

I was in the process of completing some research on the progress of democratization in Tunisia under the threat of terrorism when a message notification popped up. The message read: “I would like to connect with...

The Last Arab Man

Maha Jouini

12 min

Spain

I’ve always enjoyed everyday violence. I remember one incident in particular: broken glass in the dark. I’m not certain that it’s a real memory but when I relive the scene, I find it hard to contain...

In Praise of the Hurricane

Alejandro Morellón

4 min