by Brege Shinn
I awake naked. I’m on my bed but there are no sheets. The pillow case is gone. I scramble to my backpack for something to wear, but there’s not a stitch of clothing to be found. Confused, I look in my travel-mate’s pack, but she too has no clothes.
Damn it, I gave all [...]
by Pearl Chen
“Do you speak English?†the blonde woman asked casually as she plopped right down next to me on a block of concrete outside the bubbly Water Cube on Beijing’s Olympic Green. For such a sprawling, futuristic, Disneyland-esque plaza, it wasn’t exactly overflowing with places to sit, and we were both relieved to take [...]
by Kevin Kaiser
Scarlet and I are making out in a bathroom stall in the men’s restroom of a Hollywood eighteen-and-up club. Her fist twists the cityscape image on my red Dismemberment Plan t-shirt, pulls my body close, as I grip the flesh of her hips exposed between the too-small black shirt, the tight black pants. [...]
by Haifa Mahabir
Into the Heart of Darkness
You awake. The moon’s hue cascades the walls of your room in a whitewash, that certain shade of blue. A draft leaves your blinds rustling; the sound rapid like the flutter of insect’s wings. You hear the rise and fall of your own breath.
Shamans of the Amazon believe it’s [...]
by Cara Winters
I came to Munich twice—the first time to party and the second to cry. Do not be deceived; the vast range of emotions that this city elicited in me are no fluke, for Munich, or at least the area around Munich, is home to both Oktoberfest, the annual festival of beer, and Dachau, [...]
by Kawaii Luna
“Puerto Escondido está bien gringo, Lunita,” my friends from Oaxaca City warned me, so I expected a big tourist bus like others I’d been on–chilled cans of Fanta and Manzana Lift, chile-covered cacahuetes, movies popular decades ago on the static-laced TV screens. Instead, I am stuffed like ham in a torta, between cold [...]
By Kristin Repsher
All we wanted to do was to watch a good footy game. This seemed like a reasonable expectation, since we were sitting in the upper deck of Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium, waiting for players to line up against one another for the second half of the second of three State of Origin clashes.
Origin, which [...]
By Jennifer Hare
Uno, dos, tres – ¡ahora!
Here I am on a dusty dirt road in God-Knows-Where, Mexico, about an hour in from the border, watching three men huddled around a Chevy Suburban with a flat tire. They’re trying (unsuccessfully) to loosen the lug nuts with a wrench provided by a local rancher in order to [...]
By Haifa Mahabir
21 Hours in Rwanda
Between April and June of 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Most of the dead were Tutsis—and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus. The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his [...]
by Jessica Kerry
There were three shocking things about the Israel Defense Forces I kept running into with my parents and sister during our stay in Jerusalem.
The first was the simple fact of seeing them in the first place. There were young troops everywhere, from the Israel Museum, to the Old City, to Yad Vashem, the [...]
