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 [...]

by Diane LeBow
“That’s the Hindu Kush Mountains, the killer of Hindus.” An Afghan man sitting next to me on the Ariana Afghan Airlines flight from Dubai to Kabul leaned over and explained. Outside the window, the flat desert lands of Iran and southern Afghanistan suddenly gave way to barren blue and gray ridgebacks, like waves [...]

by Jacqueline St. Joan
Don’t take photos of the Dalai Lama into Tibet, my friends advised me. As did the U.S. State Department, the Free Tibet website and my travel guidebook. Before the Chinese Cultural Revolution, photos of the Dalai Lama were as common on the streets of Lhasa as soldiers, then in 1994 a political [...]

by Megan Lyles
This past summer I decided to take Greyhound again. A nice long trip, all the way from San Francisco, where I’d attended my ten-year high school reunion, to New York, where I was born and where I live now. I missed riding the bus. I missed wondering whether the driver would be an [...]

by Gwen Hopkins
The man in orange wasn’t the marabout.
I’d been staring at him, barely breathing, as he sat calmly and majestically with his legs folded underneath his boubou. My professor explained who he really was, some assistant, and I took a big breath. The cool air shocked my lungs and I tried to exhale slowly [...]

by Kelley Calvert
In a taxi speeding wildly into tar-black night, the car’s headlights met the blindness of dust stirred and scattered. The famous wind known as the Harmattan was blowing angrily over the Sahel of Niger, carrying its fury south and leaving a veil of dust over the desert’s ever-expanding domain.
Earlier, as I had [...]

By Marianne Rogoff
The lights have come on, the night is falling, life changes its face.
One way or another I have to keep on living.
My soul burns like a hand, physically.
I’m on the road of all men and they bump against me.
~ Fernando Pessoa
***
My hotel is as I pictured it, simple with all the comforts: nice [...]

By Juliette de Campos
In a final act of desperation I went to the Guatemalan countryside to consult a witchdoctor. It’s my habit during times of turmoil to go straight to the source. Forget the psychotherapist offering opportunities to find the answers within. I prefer to skip over trial and error and get my empiricism the [...]

by Jann Huizenga
The best thing about my short-term rental in Ragusa, Sicily is that it comes with a cleaning woman. Lucia arrives every Monday morning sporting a strand of pearls, heels, and a pencil skirt. She doesn’t shed any of them, neither while mopping the stone floors nor while scouring the bidet. I work at [...]