By Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
Translated from the Italian by Clara Hillis

Scarlette would go to sea. She was a towering and statuesque person, with steadfast legs, wearing tall boots and a black raincoat. Even during the war, after we evacuated, when the estuary would just erupt fountains of sulfur. Steaming geysers would spray into the sky, and she would go to sea. Even when the city caught all ablaze and was devoured by a white heat. Ashes everywhere: an opaque veil against the sun covered the trees, the houses, and every single rowboat. 

by Bianca Bellová
Translated from Czech by the author

It’s an interesting thing, you know: since the border’s been open, the deer still won’t cross over into Germany. They couldn’t when it was divided by the Iron Curtain, there used to be a live wire fence which would always shoot flares whenever anyone touched it. The deer learn territoriality from their mothers, right, they memorize where they lead them and so the Czech deer still walk on Czech paths and the German deer on the German paths.

by Kateryna Zarembo
Translated from Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan

Here, everything seemed unchanged—calm and quiet, as if worries, haste, and war were nonexistent. All you had to do was overlook the remnants of the burned down house across from theirs and the furniture marked by debris, not to mention the occasional air raid alerts on the phone. It was her citadel where nothing was scary.

by Marek Šindelka
Translated from Czech by Graeme Dibble

At this point, words were still too heavy a weapon for the boy. But one day, thought Petr, one day he will accomplish things with them. He’ll use them like a picklock to break into the world of various girls and women, make money using words, weave them together into a huge nest of prestige. He might go far: already you could see he had staying power.

by Khrystia Vengryniuk
Translated from Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan

Lolita went to the windowsill and lit the last candle; the others had already been burning for some time. Peering outside, she noticed the evening settling in. She arched her back with a feline-like stretch, scratching it lightly with her slender, sharp nails. Then she ran her fingers through her straight hair—slightly greasy from rosemary oil—elegantly twisting it into a bun and securing it in place with a hairpin.

By Merey Kossyn
Translated from the Kazakh by Mirgul Kali

She began to molt. The particles of skin separated from the naked body on the prayer mat, floated upward, and scattered in the air. A moment later, in perfect unity, they converged again to form a human body, the body of a girl. Reluctant to leave behind its owner, this skin, this ethereal shell of a body, kept circling the praying girl.

by Max Lawton

The dead of night and flames on either side made it completely impossible to make out anything but fire as such. That and the question of whether there were even that many trees around Santa Barbara to be set alight; I remembered it more as a sort of desert oasis nestled among low hillocks.

by Roman Malynovsky
Translated from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan and Yulia Lyubka

Going out into the dark forest, there, in the darkness, in the winter silence, is the most terrifying thing. But I nod at this proposal, and so does Marta, followed by Ilya and the rest. We will go there and do what we fear the most because this is such a moment, and each of us feels it the same way: we are strong and confident we will succeed.

by Kateryna Babkina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dominique Hoffman

When Dima’s mother called to ask Lesya and the girls to sort through his things, they went over right away. Of course, that was after the funeral was over and she was able to call anyone to say anything at all. Dima’s mother didn’t say much and, for some reason, referred to him exclusively as Staff Sergeant of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade.

by Roman Malynovsky
Translated from the Ukrainian by Mykyta Moskaliuk

Once I asked my father about the story behind this tattoo. He told me that after serving in the Soviet army (which stripped young men of their identity as if they had never existed) he decided to get his name—Gena—tattooed on his hand, so as never to ever forget that he was not just a private or a sergeant but an actual person.

by Dario Voltolini
Translated from the Italian by Stiliana Milkova

He returns home. He had been outside, playing with the other children in the barely flattened dirt strewn with pebbles. Two little girls pass by. He rests his hand on the concrete. “I can’t bear it anymore,” he says.

by Anton Hur

Gunnie went missing in Chile. It is not the kind of place a young Korean man goes missing in. Jungmin, one of his best friends at university, has been on the phone for three days. The Korean consulate, the authorities at the University of Santiago, and anyone else he could get on the phone insist he left on his own.

by Kathrin Schmidt
Translated from the German by Susan Vickerman

It was in the times when, day in day out, the only thing I cared about, looking back now, was being an Exemplary Child of the German Democratic Republic; the times when our schoolbooks contained a verdict on the previous war, but only as a thing long in the past – a past which surely couldn’t have been the one our parents had lived through.

by Herb Randall

We arrive at the improbably named village of Krushchevaya Nikitovka, once the home of a nobleman by that name, and now of Olga’s parents. She swears the village takes its name from that seventeenth-century boyar and not the Soviet leader of the 1950s, but I can’t help but wonder.