by Jeffe Aronson

Autumn, 1976

The air is cool, damp. The walls coated with long undisturbed, powder-like talc, virtually liquid. My feet sense every irregularity of the limestone floor through the thin plastic soles of Chinese slippers. I cannot tell where the water is–the pools mere phantoms, perfectly clear, perfectly calm, air melding into water as [...]

by Marianne Ruane
Whether it was all of the rocking the boat did while stalling for us to photograph the whales, or the fact that I was getting chilled, or those Denny’s breakfast sausages I probably shouldn’t have eaten, I don’t know, but all of a sudden, I was not feeling well. I had about ten [...]

by Jeffe Aronson
I glance back uphill at the slowly disappearing shape of Alan, where I left him perched on an overhanging rock ledge, sketching the remote and incomprehensible landscape visible from the tip of Great Thumb Mesa. Part of the Havasupai Indian Reservation. It’s June, which is really a stupid time to be hiking in [...]

By Kate Crawford

“Is that my elephant?” I ask as the first mammoth mammal lumbers into camp. “That’s Lawan,” John replies, watching her undulating gait. “She’s our youngest, the village flirt. She can be a bit naughty. She’s known to indulge in little diva tantrums if another elephant gets more camera time.”
Shivering in the dawn, [...]

by Sabine Bergmann
I leaned cautiously towards the road’s edge, which gave way to a sheer cliff, a gashed rock-face stretching towards the distant earth. At the bottom, a mere speck of yellow on the floor of rocks, lay the tiny carcass of a yellow bus – tiny from here, at least. Squinting, I could see [...]

by Carolyn Kraus
On a warm and windy July morning, we were headed south on the Partisan Highway out of Minsk, Belarus. Marina, the friend of a Jewish Belarusian expatriate I knew back home in Detroit, was nervous at the wheel of the little twenty-year–old Soviet-built Moskveech she’d just learned to drive, its doors wired shut [...]

by Marcia DeSanctis
Two women, one skirt, and an untold story.
The first time I met Maria Konstantinovna, she was wearing a black leather skirt. It was Italian, brand new, and it was mine.
Masha, as I would come to know her, was a dejournaya in Moscow. Women like her sat on every floor in every hotel [...]

A Journey Down the Colorado River with Captain John Wesley Powell
by Michael Shapiro
Our boats are four in number. Three are built of oak, stanch and firm (with) water-tight cabins.… These will buoy the boats should the waves roll them over in rough water. The fourth is made of pine…built for fast rowing.… We take with [...]

by Shauna Sweeney
It takes fifteen minutes to confirm I’m being followed. At first I had my doubts, kept second-, triple-, quadruple-guessing. I thought fear was playing tricks on me, making monsters out of shadows. But we’ve turned too many corners, switched onto too many new streets for coincidence. The car hasn’t left my taxi’s bumper [...]

by Johanna Gohmann
One cozy night at home, while enjoying a pizza dinner, I flipped on the television just in time to see a close-up shot of a woman’s labia being “trimmed” by a surgeon.
“Look!” I shrieked at my fiancé, involuntarily crossing my legs. “How can they show that on regular TV?!”
David glanced up from his [...]