745 Fiction entries in Mag: Articles
Center of Flacq
At the first rays of dawn, when the dogs abandon their posts and the vagrants their cardboard boxes, the most pointless of prayers ascends into the sky. A plea. God, grant us this day our daily bread .…...
The Iron Caterpillar
Strange phenomena can strike such dread into human hearts that I ask you to believe in the one that knotted the stomach of the young diver named Paolo, who noticed the haze of the tunnel when he was returning…...
Traces of Our Fathers
Writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alain Gordon Gentil has recently finished shooting four documentaries that retrace the great Indian, African, French, and Chinese adventure of immigration to the Mauritian…...
Diary of an Old Mad Woman
I am a cliché. An exotic cliché, indeed, I’ve been living here close to thirty years and like clockwork, I am asked the same questions, the same commentaries. So you come from there,…...
Weaving Dreams
And as he gazes at her, their soul-child is conceived (Henri Michaux, Life Within the Folds) That day as she finished weaving the few meters that would wind seamlessly around her body, she tied…...
The Crossing toward Hope
1997. Day breaks under a raging downpour. It’s raining buckets. Raining screams. Raining mothers’ screams that drown out the thunder of the bullets raining down on their sons. It’s raining…...
Ludwig and I Kill Hitler for No Reason (or, A Berlin Springtime)
"Another piece of pepperoni?" Ludwig offered generously. "Thanks, I'm full." I patted my stomach. "Full," Ludwig repeated the word, enchanted. "It's been so long since I heard that word." He glanced…...
The Sea Horses’ Ball
Below the Mipham plane the Himalayan sky. The wind florifies the snow. Fa-fa-mi . . . mi-fa-fa . . . Shadows gain in luxuriance, tufts of omphalodes and orthosiphon. Don’t stay grounded.…...
Wild Daffodils
It was only during our first weekend together in the Vosges Mountains that I noticed how in tune we were. Before that, whenever we met I felt as if the city, the noise, and other people were preventing…...
The Hole in the Garden, Part III
“Hello?” There was no answer. I put the phone back down. I turned to go back to the kitchen and it rang again. I picked it up, wordlessly this time. Again nothing. As soon as I hung up it rang…...
Throwing Out the Baby
The frog was leaping away but we were closing in on both sides, running along bent over, our eyes fixed on its yellow-green back, the mud squishing under our feet. There had just been a cloudburst…...
Beyond this Darkness and this Silence
The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows you are here. —H. G. Wells I warned her in one of our first conversations, though she didn’t take me seriously:…...
Tana
The rain began that morning. Tana was coming home from school. Thursday afternoons they had sewing class, and now on the bus, she realized this was the first day she'd left school in the dark. It would…...
To Troy, Helen
The two lay down together on the bed. Atreus's son paced through the crowd, like a wild beast, searching for…...
The Hunchback and Botticelli’s Venus
Fluttering locks of reddish hair whipped by the wind and rain, smooth and radiant skin, she is Botticelli’s Venus walking down the street. (The one in the Uffizi, born from a seashell, not the one…...
The Schoolyard
That Monday, her classmates were playing dodgeball again. She watched them from the step, hoping that they would formally invite her, so that she could say no until they insisted, like her mother did on…...
The Ringing Body
She always recognized them by the trembling behind their bravado. From his first “Hello” she was certain he wasn’t one of them . . . that he had meant to call her, in particular.…...
Horst
I’m thirty-nine. I’m a chemist, graduate of the university of ****. For the last twelve years I’ve been working as a lab technician for a pharmaceutical company. Practically speaking,…...
Good Women and Bad Women
We never discovered how they found us out. My brother insisted that Márgara had stumbled across them accidentally while she was putting clean sheets on the bed, and that she had squealed on us.…...
The Bicycle Factory
In 1966, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu issued Decree 770, criminalizing abortion. After that, women found their own ways to end unwanted pregnancies, no matter the risk. With money and contacts,…...
