By Juilene Osborne-McKnight Grand Prize Bronze winner of the Twelfth Annual Solas Awards Trastevere They have cleaned the fountain in the Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere. This means that it no longer works. Water spills over the basin and down the sides. On the lone dry step, the King of the Gypsies has taken […]
By Aaron Gilbreath Within Tokyo’s populous Shibuya ward lies the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing. By some estimates, 2,500 people cross here during rush hour each time the signal changes. Locals call it “The Scramble.” Every day, over two million passengers pass through neighboring Shibuya Station, commuting to work and enjoying the area’s countless shops and […]
By Angelique Stevens It was a full moon, which meant from my vantage point, I could see his naked silhouette shining blue as he washed his body behind the big lorry. I was naked too, behind the Land Rover. The body was so familiar, that wiry frame, those graceful hands, the shaven head and the […]
By Anna Vodicka On Peleliu, the roads are paved with coral—a once-living thing, a hardy animal. The coral came from the inland ridges and valleys of this two-by-six-mile speck among specks in the island nation of Palau, in western Micronesia, an almost invisible scene in the shadow of bigger acts in the Pacific, where land itself […]
By Katherine Jamieson A tropical love story in Guyana. The one-room schoolhouse rang with the din of teenage girls’ voices in the humid afternoon air. Someone had erased the sentences with their adjectives and nouns underlined from the black wooden slab we used for a chalkboard and scrawled out a rough schedule for the upcoming […]
By James Michael Dorsey A magical day in Mali. Hippos surfaced with wiggling ears as the boat man poled our dhow past the submerged herd. We were both tense, expecting a bluff charge, while only feet away white pelicans with long golden beaks floated in the shallows casually scooping minnows in their great fleshy pouches. […]
By Glenda Reed “When the sea is calm, every ship has a good captain.” —Sailing proverb I watched the sleeping ocean from a corner of the cockpit. In the deep darkness, blind waves broke and collapsed in rhythmic, drawn-out hisses, luring me to sleep as they misted me with spray. Even in sleep, the ocean […]
By Lance Mason A lesson in southern Africa, circa 1988. In Africa, we are all children. Everything is new, and everything is old. The sapling sprouting among the creepers is new; the forest, old. Though the baby in the kaross sling is new, his tribe is old. The dawn’s breeze swirls the dust over the […]
By Mario Kaiser Most people dream of spending their honeymoon on exotic beaches. My American bride and I opted for a road trip through the land of the ayatollahs. We raced through the darkness and didn’t see it coming. Mehdi sat erect behind the wheel, honking slower cars out of his way. But one car […]
By Erin Byrne May you travel in an awakened way, Gathered wisely into your inner ground, That you may not waste the invitations Which wait along the way to transform you. —John O’Donohue, poem “For the Traveler” Stone apostles frowned down over their curly beards, and I withered. Again and again, I had flown from […]
