by Lauren Davis

Neither I
nor the seasons
forget
what was before.
Only each of us make
a joyous rebirth
of what ourselves have figured out.

by Anastasiia Ovcharova
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

I remember our first meeting well. I was washing my hands with ice water in the procedure room when she came in to get acquainted, asking what language would be more convenient for me to speak. I replied that I understood both Ukrainian and Russian ​​very well, “So, you can speak what suits you better.”

by Olena Stiazhkina
Translated from the Russian by Uilleam Blacker

They did see each other later, after his wife, Varda, had left—and not just in their dreams. Not often, but they saw each other. They would say hello, they would chat. “Here are mine,” she’d say and show him photographs. First in her wallet, later on, her phone. Revazov didn’t show her any photos.

by Irina Papancheva
Translated from the Bulgarian by Elitza Kotzeva

It was a lot to take—this very hospital, the terror of the needle inside my arm, all that I have gone through, the removal of the last traces. “Do you have children?” asked the nurse trying to distract me while the other one was inserting the IV into my arm. The wrong question again.

by Andrea Tompa
Translated from the Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly

Perhaps she’s no longer the same person who has once left. Could she be different at the level of her cells, too? How much time would her mother’s cells need before this could happen to her? And how about the soul? How much time would the soul require?

by Mikhail Iossel

It was a characteristically damp and cold November morning, the third after the sixty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. I was nearing the end of my fourth semiweekly twenty-four hour shift as a security guard at the Roller Coaster Unit of the Krestovsky Island Amusement Sector of the Leningrad Central Park of Culture and Leisure (TsPKiO). At seven-forty, I was still fast asleep on the long and narrow leatherette couch on the second floor of the Amusement Sector’s administration cabin—the uneven, cracked black plastic-coated fabric under me; a stinking, ancient communal goatskin over me; my head propped on the pillowy lump of my rolled-up sweater—when my replacement arrived, twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and started banging on the bolted and latched cabin door downstairs.

by Oksana Zabuzhko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Nina Murray

Today it is impossible for me to recapture all the details of what I felt, when, as a child, I looked at the stars and sensed (at night—I couldn't do it during the day when the stars were invisible) that the sky is alive—and knowing this made me utterly happy.

by Alta Ifland

When the US skating championship started in mid-February, Ben’s presence in our house was so common that we were left alone on the brown suede couch in front of the TV with a huge bowl of popcorn between us, and more than once, when he went home, it was close to midnight.  Usually, Mother sat with us until about ten, joining me in my kibitzing. 

by Andriy Lyubka
Translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

That December evening, fog had to settle on Uzhhorod, a drunk judge at the wheel of a BMW X5 had to be flying along the slick asphalt of Hrushevskiy Street, staring at his phone—he didn’t notice, didn’t react, didn’t brake—and slam into my wife’s tender, 115-pound body with two tons of black metal, and she had to flutter into the air and land on the ground, already dead, and that damn German airbag simply had to pop out and save the driver, for me, twenty-nine years into my life, to finally have a real purpose.

by Vasyl Makhno
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

Brooklyn’s Forty-Second Street in Borough Park is unenticing and monotone, as are the rest of the surrounding streets. In the winter, it’s cleaner than in the summer. In the fall, it’s warmer than in the spring. The industrial zones on the shores of New York Harbor—Sunset Park and Green-Wood Cemetery—cling to it like tipsy bridesmaids so that, God forbid, it not give them the slip. It’s intersected—or, more precisely, interrupted—by the Mexican Fifth, the Chinese Eighth, and the Hasidic Thirteenth Avenues, and in one spot the metal structure of the subway that covers all of New Utrecht hangs above it.

by Lena Eltang
Translated from the Russian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

When I was a little girl, I thought time was like a ball; what we call the past is still happening, concurrently with our present lives. It’s just on the other side of the ball, and if you find the right tunnel, you can descend into times past and take a look at the people who lived them. For me, olive trees were tunnels like that—after all, they live for about two thousand years. It’s nice to think you’re touching the same trunk as one of the Argonauts who landed at Salerno. It’s a real shame my teachers disabused me of that notion; if they hadn’t, I’d be free to think that little Brie was still out there somewhere, walking down his own path.

by Brinda Banerjee

Andre Zachalenko, the apartment complex super, stomped in the front door at number 102, determined to project displeasure at being dragged out on that rainy morning to do his job. He inhaled the aroma of cinnamon, cloves and fried onions in the air. His native Russian cooking smells were vastly different.

by Maxym Dupeshko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

I don’t know what lures me here. I come to this mountain a few times a year as to a place of spiritual pilgrimage, foraging here for air suffused with oxygen atoms and the scent of conifers. Though that’s most likely only part of it. It’s not just the taste of the air, not just the sweet headiness of the beech and fir trees, not just the pleasant height with its distant Bukovynian skyline, but also… But also something impalpable that unfurls through this space and pulsates all around. 

by Yuri Andrukhovych
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky

In all the years given to him Mario Pongratz committed only one murder. He would only have to face the responsibility for it at the heavenly court, and the details of that closed trial remain unknown—for understandable reasons. As for the earthly court, it was very open indeed and sentenced Mario Pongratz under a completely different article. However, this is not at all the beginning, but rather one of the endings of this story, and it looms somewhere far ahead, sometime in the 1890s.

By Artem Chapeye
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

He even felt jealous of that old lady. The crowd splashed out of the metro into the Akademmistechko Station. People flooded the stairs from wall to wall. And that old woman was walking in the opposite direction with a vengeful look and squabbling loudly. “This is a mob! People can’t even get through!” She genuinely viewed herself as separate, as different. As if she wasn’t a part of the mob. He felt jealous of that lady because it just didn’t work for him like that anymore. 

by Lyubko Deresh
Translated from the Ukrainian by Patrick John Corness

So, von Liebig was a courteous person. In his lectures, however contentious the issue under debate might be, he always acted with decorum when speaking of his critics, noting their strengths and praising their achievements. This completely won over Stefan Lange, who was at the time a third year student in the languages department of the University of Vienna.

by Victoria Amelina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

After Tarik was gone, and the Egyptian government had yielded its positions, I closed my laptop and walked up to the window. It was spring, and it wasn’t yellow leaves, as on that distant day in the fall of 1989, but now the white petals of an old pear tree that swirled in the yard between the hanging linens and the maples, abloom with the green heartlings of newborn life.

by Lucie Faulerová
Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker

It was the worst moment of her life—except for all the others, that is. It was the worst moment of my life—except for all the others, that is. Except for the ones behind me now, waving to me with that look of satisfaction from a job well done, and except for the ones looking forward to me, shuffling their feet in anticipation, watching out for my arrival, chins lifted and arms spread wide.

by Marek Šindelka
Translated from the Czech by Nathan Fields

The grain is smooth and shines like a pearl. Hardly half a millimeter in length. Its origin is unclear. Maybe the remains of undersea mountains on the bottom of the ancient ocean, maybe a tiny particle of Saharan sand transported by subtropical wind from continent to continent. Maybe (and this is most probable) it is just ordinary debris without meaning or past. The grain, along with a number of others, is stuck onto a tiny piece of apple pulp full of putrid bacteria. The pulp glistens and ferments.

by Jana Šrámková
Translated from the Czech by Andrea Goldbergerová

And then there was an awful humming sound, and it already fell down, flying crossways, it just cut out a portion of our house from the side like this. Wouldn’t you go hide in the cellar? We would, we had been there three times at night, but there was no time, I don’t know why they did not sound the alarm, nobody was expecting it.