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Sitting in Awkwardness: Translating Olga Ravn’s “De Ansatte”
Aboard the Six Thousand Ship, employee testimonies put the question of humanity on the forefront, disguising this philosophical inquiry within the mundane bureaucracy of workplace testimonials.
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True Vision
“Their next destination, they believe, will uncover something staggering: a single place where the tides have converged the bulk of humanity’s discarded waste. They are determined to expose the truth.”
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An Atheist Guide to Grief
“Life had been returned to her—the one she squeezed every drop of, the one she did and redid in her stories when it was just the two of us in the living room of our first house.”
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The House Behind Gladewood Street
“I thought about how I used to sleep on Gladewood Street with the passing trains at night. It reminded me of the boy who lived even closer to the tracks than I did, whose name I couldn’t remember.”
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Alyosha
The summer’s heat was known to bring solids to liquids, ice to water, clots to running blood. On that day in August 1904, the Tsarina felt a turning in her stomach. She gripped her womb, and called to her husband and their maids. They whisked her to the nurse’s room, following each other like a…
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The Truth Well Expressed
You must believe you have sinned. You don’t go to heaven because you’re good. You go to heaven for a man named Jesus. Ask Jesus to forgive you and he will clean your heart. These fervid phrases coming from the speakers, designed to lure revelers to the apartment’s empty dancefloor, had a curious pertinence…
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Ben’s Eschatology
He’s compact, twenty-five, staring at a line of mathematical notation on a whiteboard. He’s in a mostly undecorated, windowless office alone. He rakes his fingers through his hair and rubs the back of his neck. The air is humid and he can hear distant thunder. A beer he hasn’t enjoyed, with a film of condensation…
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Empty Bottles
Sasha awoke too soon for his liking. He felt as if he’d seen the sun rise but an hour ago, when really the waning effects of wine had enabled him to soundly sleep away the past few. It was near eleven now, and he’d forgotten to pull the curtains tight before exhaustion had brought about…
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Finding God at 35
“She was looking for something not entirely visible, not entirely tangible, not entirely a glow-in-the-dark beetle whose bum lit up, but some kind of reminder that the strange and ephemeral can manifest as physical, biological.”
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Thorn
“Her swiping was formulaic. As the ratio of inked to bare skin–the share of pierced to unblemished–increased, so did her interest. She wasn’t attracted to them, necessarily. She was interested in the way they altered their bodies to mark moments in their lives they deemed significant.”