A young pilot makes her first solo flight over an Arizona town and reconnects with her skeptical mother below.

A psychiatric patient convinced that interpersonal strife originates from physical fish blockages in the throat helps a fellow patient.

An eleven-year-old girl leads a neighborhood gang in a suburban turf war against rival children on a local golf course.

A husband watches his wife slowly transform into a loaf of bread, becoming a staple of domestic consumption and survival.

A disillusioned street performer leads schoolchildren through a forest while wrestling with the wreckage of his own creative identity.

A small object becomes the pivot point for a shifting domestic landscape and a family's quiet, persistent tension.

A man receives murderous instructions from his dead mother and begins a conversation about grief and familial dysfunction.

A traveler in Trieste wanders through bookstores and libraries before locating an elderly woman in a quiet, hillside hospital.

A twenty-year-old Harlem model struggles to reconcile her independent life with the sudden reappearance of her biological father.

Discarded family photographs found in Brooklyn junk shops inspire brief, imagined histories of the anonymous people captured within them.

An aging revolutionary confronts the weight of past violence and political disillusionment while attending a former comrade's church funeral.

A son escorts a formidable novelist through California, seeking clarity on a family friend’s mysterious and final disappearance.

A lifelong fan of a collectible card game navigates shifting social spheres from a lonely adolescence to adulthood.

A man living with the aftermath of a spinal cord injury tries to negotiate desire and dignity on a first date.

An expatriate woman navigates the social friction of an English dinner party while carrying the heavy memory of home.

An Iranian-American father watches his son study the mechanics of an auto repair shop in a quiet neighborhood.

A gas station built on exploitation cycles through an endless succession of laborers beneath the watchful eye of capital.

A woman who inexplicably finds her father in the desert struggles to accommodate his sudden, messy return to her life.

An isolated seventh grader leaves her cast horse in a locked stable as she confronts the limits of connection.

A friendship between two girls endures through bat mitzvahs, slumber parties, and the slow drift of adult life.

A mother struggles to process her daughter's murder in the United Kingdom while mourning within the quiet of Nigeria.

A persistent journalist corners Henry James in his Sussex study, attempting to reconcile his guarded life with invasive scrutiny.

A singer standing in a late-night pharmacy line finds herself haunted by the origin of her most famous question.

A mother nursing her son navigates the volatile intimacy of her husband's unfolding confessions regarding his ongoing struggle with addiction.

A divorced mother navigating a delayed flight experiences a harrowing disintegration of her accustomed manners amid chaotic terminal crowds.

A sleepless writer navigates a fraught visit from her mother while tethered to memories of a recent summer affair.

A student in New York keeps vigil at a hospital bed as a young Cameroonian friend battles blood disease.

A writer recounts his brother's dream of their late parents reuniting in a park, lingering on grief and memory.

Operatives for a clandestine intelligence agency draft psychological profiles of public figures based on their televised appearances and behaviors.

A wedding guest encounters an unbidden confidant on a terrace, who boasts of a secret, impending affair with the bride.

After her grandmother dies and her mother puts herself up for adoption, a young woman fields calls from strangers while reckoning with a childhood of suffocating love.

A lonely printer worker engages a professional service to simulate the intimacy of falling in love with a stranger.

A man navigates the discomfort of dating a new woman who shares the same name as his recent ex.

A lonely woman, startled by intrusive middle-of-the-night telephone calls, struggles to navigate the messy, unbidden emotions of strangers.

A daughter attempts to outwit mortality after her dying father grants her an impossible, cursed request for forever.

An earthquake preparedness plan becomes a strained map for a fraying relationship as disaster and infidelity collide in a city.

A young man considers the weight of lineage and mortality at his father's funeral in the humid marshes of Mississippi.

An aging father issues a relentless, granular manual of survival and propriety to his son from a hospital bed.

A man seeks intimacy in the dark corners of a porno theater while reflecting on his father's cruelty and lost connections.

A young man manages his uncle’s convenience store while haunted by his cousin’s imprisonment and the family’s fractured history.

A survivor of ritual violence and war reconciles her past by methodically dismantling her husband's body and absorbing his essence.

An invisible Witness risks his existence by attempting to make himself known to the lonely woman he observes.

A couple traverses the uncanny architecture of Salem and a museum while navigating a pervasive, quiet modern anxiety.

A series of macabre images and historical executions become a canvas for childhood memories and formal artistic investigations.

Two young writers hike through the mountains while grappling with personal betrayals and the unsettling realities of their mentor's private life.

A bank clerk’s obsession with a fox fur coat precipitates a visceral, unsettling transformation into a wilder, primal state.

Two disparate figures navigate the rigid social and physical structures of their environment through varying states of bodily misalignment.

A professional skateboarder's assistant navigates a deteriorating life of service to his employer, haunted by effigies and his own fading youth.

A panicked mother begins a desperate, solitary search for her eighteen-year-old daughter after a cryptic, interrupted phone call late night.

Two young sisters navigate a racial confrontation on the streets of 1941 Chicago while waiting for their father's arrival.

A South African exile living in Berlin encounters a compatriot whose past and present collide in a quiet public park.

A restless family waits for a promised, life-altering technology while navigating the frayed edges of their failing domestic routines.

Young men from Arewa migrate to the sprawling, unpredictable metropolis of Lagos in search of work and newfound personal freedom.

A dedicated music teacher becomes a vital guide for two students discovering their own identities in 1970s suburban Texas.

A television medium and a group of affluent socialites spiral into insults and chaotic resentment over a dinner party.

A woman grieving the death of a public figure confronts her own suffocating domestic life at a funeral in Achina.

A widowed woman orchestrates an illicit sand-mining operation to secure her family’s future while physically consuming the material of trade.

An engineer overseeing Singapore's massive land reclamation projects navigates the moral sediment of a life built on shifting, bought, and stolen sands.

Vignettes of aging and past encounters sift through memory to reassemble the fleeting shapes of love and loss.

A suburban family maintains a cold, bureaucratic archive of the reclusive man living in their locked cellar.

Two elderly sisters furnish their apartment with a gargantuan, ever-expanding chandelier to illuminate their fading world and defy age.

An immigrant woman navigating the anxieties of language barriers finds an unexpected moment of social solidarity on a train.

A man visits his isolated sister, who spends her days calling a mysterious service for news of the dead.

A writer struggles to finish a story about a prisoner's letter while watching his wife succumb to terminal illness.

A husband navigates the fraying edges of his marriage while entangled in a secret, drug-fueled recurrence with a former flame.

A man reconstructs his childhood memories of his father’s garrulous friend, a seafaring teller of tall tales.

A child navigates the rigid borders between East and West Berlin through the lens of science fiction and family secrets.

A nursing woman's public struggle with poverty bridges the lives of two strangers linked by digital images of motherhood.

A young veteran returns from war with a rifle, forcing his estranged parents to reconcile their fractured, shared past.

A new mother finds her home invaded by her husband and her obstetrician, who hold her life and autonomy under interrogation.

A feverish woman lies dying in the Caucasus and drifts into memories of political exile, revolutionary comrades, and skating apparitions.

Two Kentucky farmers sustain a deliberate, marginal economy that prioritizes neighborly work and self-reliance over the lures of modern industry.

An elderly farmer teaches a gifted music student the disciplined labor of clearing brush left by a careless fencing crew.

A rural community matriarch nears death in a Kentucky river valley as her granddaughters watch through a long night.

A young boy tests the boundaries of his mother's patience and the laws of physics in rural Kentucky.

A husband attempts to secure funds for an expensive family vacation by seeking out his estranged, alcoholic brother in Arizona.

A woman isolates herself in a remote house to read, but a persistent meter reader disrupts her fragile and increasingly morbid solitude.

A brother and sister navigate a world overrun by insects as they weigh the cost of departure and stay.

‘You should have seen him that night, though. I didn’t know what’d got into him.’ Fiction by Thomas Morris.

‘That thing behind the door was so filthy, so repugnant, that I couldn’t imagine anyone I could call for help.’ Fiction by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston.

‘Unlike the other Chopra men in the complex, Mohit knew how to concentrate his rage.’ An extract from The Complex by Karan Mahajan.

A gift shop in Los Alamos displays atomic souvenirs as a visitor recalls instances of casual, everyday racial entitlement.

‘Day care meant sick baby. And sick baby meant she had to skip work to care for sick baby, and entertain sick baby with bad mom art.’ A short story by Nora Lange.

‘Elections are good, but what’s going on now is a war, don’t you think?’

‘Contractor and Agraharam Latha lorded over everyone’s ablution schedule in the school.’ A short story by Krupa Ge.

‘Nalli bones, ribs, liver and other meat pieces were bathing in steam. In the fragrance of the saaru, she forgot the incident.’ A short story by H.R. Ramesh, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi.

‘He had gone to school fearful that they might drag him along for some work otherwise. This was how he received an education.’

‘After a conversation with her gynaecologist who shares the same name, Mandovi is diagnosed with a UTI. Doctor Mandovi tells Mandovi it’s normal, that she shouldn’t feel any shame, which makes Mandovi wonder why the doctor has to say it at all.’

‘Slowly we had developed a ritual. My mother liked to have a cup of tea, be steam pressed, and then placed into the bag every night. Her bones ached and she said that she was looking for respite.’

‘She had resolved to get married to anyone they found and seek her own calling later.’

‘Usually, if you’ve read someone’s stories and seen their photos, you’d feel like you knew the man.’ A short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Matt Reeck.

‘Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?’ Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

‘He wasn’t listening. Their entire conversation had seemed pointless and a waste of time. He forced himself to smile, then got up.’

A swarm of girls navigates hunger and home in a neighborhood where silence is a luxury the poor cannot afford.

‘Two men set about undressing him. They led the naked boy by the hand, sat him down on the clay platform, spread their palms across his shoulders, and pressed him down.’

A deaf teacher navigates the familiar cycle of hope and disappointment when another hearing lover attempts to learn American Sign Language.

A traveler joins a restless married couple on a road trip through the kitschy tourist landscape of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

‘When the face is a mess, as we say to juniors, the rest follows, things begin to slip.’Fiction by Leopold O’Shea.

‘I want an outlook on life, a plan for my life. I want to feel like an excited dog.’

Cora and Indra reconcile their divergent political ambitions while planning an escape from New York City to revolutionary Mexico.

‘I remembered Selma as a girl who, when she turned up for vacation at my grandparents’ one day, had stepped down from the train with an enormous bunch of wildflowers.’

‘She promised Ruth, at the end, she would not let anything bad happen. “Not on my watch,” Jean said. “No! Never! No way!” Who in their right mind dished out such pronouncements? Frank Sinatra?’

A woman carries a stranger’s remains in a plastic bag through a landscape of shifting memories and vanishing identities.

‘Here we go, he thought. Time to be the son and heir, the head of the estate, the gatekeeper of the flame, the flamekeeper of the gate, the standard-bearer of the Jesus Christ enough already.’ Fiction by Joshua Cohen.

‘The islanders held him in a large dog cage under a banyan tree by the village square, awaiting the day when someone would convey him to a prison camp.’ Fiction by Tong Wei-Ger, translated by Tony Hao.

‘I picked up a dry leaf, and when the caterpillar climbed aboard, I carried the leaf to the safety of the grass and set it down at the base of a tree.’ Fiction by Kathryn Scanlan.

‘It would be wrong to say she hasn’t experienced life. Instead, it would be more apt to describe her as someone whom time has slipped by without leaving the slightest trace.’ Fiction by Wang Anyi, translated by Michael Berry.

A great-grandmother tracks the transmission of tradition, womanhood, and inherited silence across four generations of an Indian family.

A young writer uses a national short story prize to challenge the repressive silences of her middle-class Singaporean family.

‘I promise you, the committee only looks at two things: how feasible a proposal is, and what it could actually do for the environment.’ A bureaucrat and an entrepreneur discuss environment-saving proposals in a short play by Si’an Chen, translated by Jeremy Tiang.

‘While I worked, I calculated roughly how many elements I plugged during a standard working day, which consisted of twelve hours including lunch and supper breaks.’

‘I had been back for three days and was still having nightmares about the fish that ate people.’

‘To make sure she was looking her best in the photos, Wu Jiayu avoided eating during our dates, and she didn’t order anything for me when we were done.’ A short story by Wang Zhanhei, translated by Dave Haysom.

A young traveler navigating family ties in China finds her own hunger mirroring a culture of consumption and bodily violence.

‘Whether it was a man and a woman, two men, two women, two dogs or two cats, as long as there was a whiff of sex in the air, everyone got incredibly worked up and started screaming attack slogans.’

A retired island official searches for clarity in Tokyo after the death of a boy he once mentored.

Two friends navigate their shared history of performing masculinity while transitioning into the women they eventually become.

A grandfather and his granddaughter cultivate novelty in a sealed desert colony while mourning the daughter who fled.

A woman discovers the head of her former friend rooted in her backyard and faces the demands of his unwanted return.

Mold blooms in an Iowa apartment, offering a grieving, post-abortion woman a strange and hungry new form of intimacy.

An elderly woman protects her grandchild from the traumatic memories of a family's desperate flight during the Partition.

A young woman tracks the inheritance of family myths and the quiet, persistent accumulation of domestic grief across generations.

Two boys flee their town after a tornado and confront a grotesque relic hidden within the boughs of a tree.

A teenager working at a convenience store observes his mother's strange obsession with collecting plastic bags amid local economic shifts.

A middle-aged man sifts through his late father’s hoarding hoard, confronting ghosts and the blurred boundaries between human memory and technology.

A son clears out a transient father's trailer in Idaho, sorting through a lifetime of discarded license plates and unresolved grief.

Siblings on an organic farm reckon with their adopted sister's mysterious, wordless connection to the moon and the night sky.

A call center employee monitors a coworker's movements while navigating the suffocating weight of family expectations and urban longing.

A young woman wanders a sterile, divinely curated afterlife while attempting to reconcile the spectral memory of her mother.

A young man navigates the uneven terrain of his upbringing, family estrangement, and the fragile joy of raising a brother.

A man returns to Medellín with his uncle to visit an old friend amid the city's lingering, violent memories.

A midsize city converts drug tunnels and unclaimed remains into a sanitized heritage site for affluent new residents.

A paper rocket and a grandmother's crochet projects trace the fragments of a cooling, long-distance romantic entanglement.

A woman travels to Istanbul to reconcile with her deceased mother's history, finding only disjointed fragments of heritage.

A graduate student procrastinating on a dissertation proposal feels the pull of her mother's suffocating, unconditional, and inescapable love.

Two sisters piece together their father’s spectral encounter at a hot spring, unearthing a secret history of ghostly poetry.

A teenager in Queens navigates a complicated day of skipped school, secret intimacy, and fading friendships during a victory parade.

A dazed driver undergoes a surreal police interrogation following a night-time car accident on a rain-slicked road.

A young graphic designer navigates a fractured friendship and an intense, transformative solo journey across Europe and into Istanbul.

Siblings navigate their mother's move to a retirement village while processing long-held memories and the unspoken language of trees.

A phone worker assumes various borrowed identities for strangers until the boundary between performance and her own reality dissolves.

A traveler waiting in a customs line hides an undeclared orange while confronting the complicity of her own family dynamics.

A young Prince Claudius navigates his father's madness as Elsinore Castle overflows with poultry purportedly containing the souls of the dead.

A young girl and her friends dismantle the cycle of abuse governing her visits to a neighbor's quiet house.

A woman spends her hard-won half-day off surreptitiously replanting native eucalypts within a commercial forestry plantation in Tasmania.

A village repairer in a landscape reclaimed by floodwaters attempts to forge a connection with a grieving neighbor.

Missing lingerie in a Nairobi tenement triggers a sequence of neighborly accusations and a cycle of unexplained local deaths.

A persistent specter haunts the rain-slicked Incheon bridge while thirteen-year-olds witness their first death on a secluded Chesapeake dock.

Fiction - The Offing Magazine

Fiction - The Offing Magazine

Children in a California suburb navigate the jagged, mythic edges of poverty and displacement within their immigrant families.

A young woman navigates a cross-country move, grappling with job anxiety, parental expectations, and her own profound discomfort behind the wheel.

A traveler drives through California toward an ancestral past while hiding a mysterious and heavy burden in a car trunk.

A neighborhood social pariah who controls local vermin finds her life irrevocably altered by a massive lottery win.

A mother obsessively restages her deceased daughter's memories through a younger child in a desperate attempt to resurrect the past.

A young girl navigates a town that insists she is dead even as she walks and breathes among them.

Four historical figures confront moments of transformation, impending mortality, or profound dislocation within these vignettes of internal and external struggle.