Roundabout by Mia Alvar
Get Away, Little Man by Brian Joseph Hurley
Caretaking by Betsy Aaron
Five-and-Dime Valentine by Felicia Luna Lemus
Last Resort by Nova Ren Suma
Wonder Woman Grew Up In Nebraska by Sarah Gerkensmeyer
The New Children by Kira Henehan
Dumpster Tuesday by Scott Snyder

Under a salt-white sky outside of Bahrain’s only airport, I scan the parking lot with my daughter Clara, waiting to be picked up. Sunlight flashes off the cars and makes us squint. Only the Arabic numbers, etched like knife strokes into license plates, hint at any foreignness; otherwise these are the same Nissans and Chevrolets you would find anywhere. I’d have hoped for something less familiar. Some memorably alien sight to greet me right away, like a camel. At least the weather’s different, I tell myself, suit and tie growing heavy on my skin. We come from a tropical country, and in this hard new desert heat I feel like earthenware left out to dry.

From between the gleaming trunks and hoods I hear my name. “Vic!” A familiar voice. And then my old friend Ben appears, T-shirted and sandal-shod, waving. We shake hands and clasp shoulders. How long has it been? Almost ten years now, we determine. He kneels to have a look at Clara. His graying hair has thinned a little. Bahraini time is five hours behind the Philippines’—does this fact make us younger now, I wonder? “I knew your mother,” Ben tells Clara, then seems to decide against saying more. He leads us to a maroon Toyota Cressida. WELL COME! reads a sun shade drawn across the windshield. The brand-new car belongs to me: “A company perk,” says Ben, though I, like any newcomer, don’t have a license to drive in this country.

Instead it’s Ben who drives us from the lot and airfield. Clara unzips her knapsack behind us. The girl is six, but self-sufficient to a point that is unnerving. On the flight—the first of her life, so far—she somehow thought to save the food she didn’t eat: jam, a candy bar, a plastic tub of crackers and spreadable cheese. There’s a rustle of foil being torn open, and Ben glances in his rearview mirror. “Hang on, Clara,” he says, “it’s Ramadan and all the Arabs are fasting.”
“Fasting,” she repeats. “Like forty days at Lent?”

“Similar,” says Ben. He starts to tell her things he has explained to me before: the holy month, the abstinence from food and drink in daylight hours. In fact, everything I know about Bahrain I know from Ben Castro, who attended college with me back home. He came here a decade ago to jump what he calls the Black Gold Bandwagon. Of course it was Ben who told me that the oil refinery was hiring, and that if I was looking for a new beginning, far from Manila with its crowds and chaos and words like “megalopolis” now, Bahrain was the place for it. It is remote enough, a sliver of sand and limestone on the Arabian Gulf, and tiny. On some maps it is smaller than its own name. “We are guests in their country,” Ben is saying, “so you must hide below the window to eat. Can you do that?”

Clara nods into the rearview mirror and crouches behind me, licking her fingers.

-From Roundabout by Mia Alvar

A cleft lip is not so bad, says his mother.

She is kneading bread again. The entire city is without electricity, and far up into the hills they have no power, but here at the house, the gas stove is working. Anselmo’s mother has found a way to make bread.

Outside, the street is darker than it has ever been.

Anselmo brings the candlestick closer. The bright radius of the flame reveals his mother’s white elbow and her knuckles buried in dough. As she kneads, he can see the loose flesh of her arm swinging low. She rubs in more flour.

There are worse things, she says. Like being disrespectful or cowardly or running out on a family. What matters in the end is how a man carries himself.

-From Get Away, Little Man by Brian Joseph Hurley

Situations-Wanted Ad: Non-abstemious agnostic wants to live like Agnes Martin—but not during that spell when she had to work as a dishwasher. I’ve already done the shit jobs: picking out pubic hairs from motel bathtubs, selling marked-down bras and girdles to jumbo-size women, working overtime for coke fiends who used the business of documentary film production for cover.

-From Caretaking by Betsy Aaron

Patti lured me in with promises of a little extra something if I called her in the next three minutes. “A special surprise just for you,” she whispered, and caressed the heart locket Angela wore strung on a gold chain around her too-long failed-swan neck. The camera zoomed in extra tight as Patti’s long manicured fingernails grazed Angela’s flesh. Nestled right above Angela’s pert tits, the gold locket caught light and glistened. I shivered.

Patti was pretty, but not exceptionally beautiful, same as the endless call girls pictured on glossy little square advertisement flyers, their outsized curves and skinny shaved bodies strategically blacked out with jagged Sharpie pen lines in accordance with some newly enforced and entirely misplaced Pilgrim ordinance—just like the lassies littered on the sidewalks outside our casino, And even better than those interchangeable disposable girls, Patti was an excellent whore—more geisha than streetwalker.

One look and I was hooked so hard I was certain that whatever she could offer would actually edify me.

I was depleted. I’d already spent the twenty dollars of gambling money credited on the plastic card all the other tour folk had looped around their necks, but which I insisted on clipping to the inside of my jacket. Half an hour at a dollar slot machine, bored, I’d given away my two free drink coupons and headed up to my economy room. I’d agreed to come to Vegas only because Marjorie had begged. She said it’d be fun, that it’d take us out of our normal routine. I liked our normal routine. Always had. But even more than our routine, I liked making Marjorie happy.

-From Five-and-Dime Valentine by Felicia Luna Lemus

Cousin Sandy’s driveway is marked with a heart—a piece of tin hanging off the bottom of her mailbox—painted red. You’d think a therapist would want a head hanging off her box, a big head bobbing in the wind. At least then her patients would know where to turn. But instead there’s the heart and past that only tire tracks through the bright white snow. Is this where my mother expects me to spend the winter, this nowhere place of blue mountains and bare trees and actual living deer that leap out at your car when you sail around the first blind bend? My mother got into a panic when she almost hit a deer, its white-tailed backside giving her heart palpitations for the past half hour. Now that we’re safely in the house, Cousin Sandy has made my mother a cup of tea and Cousin Larry has a hand on my mother’s arm, telling her there’s nothing to worry about, the deer got away, the deer is just fine.

-From Last Resort by Nova Ren Suma

Wonder Woman rides shotgun. She turns the radio up and rolls the window down, just barely smiling as the wind whips at her and makes her hair go crazy wild. This is one of her most favorite things of all.

Lisa leans over Wonder Woman’s shoulder, her chest pressed into the back of the passenger-side front seat.

“Check my breath,” she says.

Lisa pushes her face close to Wonder Woman’s and opens her mouth. She exhales. Her soft, corn-colored hair slides across Wonder Woman’s cheek.

“Gross,” Wonder Woman says, waving her hand lazily.

“No,” Lisa insists, hovering. “Just check it.”

Another exhale. Wonder Woman smells green mint, from the gum that they all chew. And something else. Something empty smelling and pleasant that she can’t identify.

“You’re fine,” she says, reaching through Lisa’s hair and placing her palm in the middle of her forehead, giving a gentle yet solid shove.

Jane, who is driving, laughs. Lisa sinks into the darkness of the backseat and giggles. All three of them laugh, at nothing.

Wonder Woman doesn’t recognize the intimacy of such moments—getting close enough to check Lisa’s breath or absently comb her thin fingers through Jane’s hair while she drives. When the three of them are pressed tight together on her firm, childhood bed, Wonder Woman does not become sentimental. Instead, she looks for vague feelings of intimacy elsewhere, in strange places like an airport bar. She won’t recognize the closeness that the three of them share until years later, long after they have lost touch. Chopping vegetables for a soup late one winter afternoon in her kitchen, it will hit her. A heavy sadness, guilt in her gut.

-From Wonder Woman Grew Up In Nebraska by Sarah Gerkensmeyer

When the bombs went off, we were watching TV. There wasn’t cable then, by which I mean cable existed but not in our apartment, so it was a prime-time network show that we wouldn’t necessarily want to admit in certain circles to regularly watching. Those circles being our circle and the peripheral circles in which we moved, or rarely moved, per se, but were considered nonetheless a part of. It was a show about sexy singles, featuring a complicated and ever-changing system of hierarchies and feats of strength and alliances and betrayals. We watched it every week and drank short fat bottles of Jamaican beer, which along with the surfboard rug Lou had gotten me for my birthday, created a sort of tropical feel to the apartment. Lou was wearing the hands-down sexiest faded pink thing, a negligee? It was short and low and shiny, and she’d found it pitched somewhere deep in her closet that day in a fury of late-summer cleaning, for which I thanked profusely all the powers that be while simultaneously ruing them for not revealing it to her sooner. She’d filled two big boxes with cast-offs to send to my little sister and her startlingly hot aunt, and her closet still looked exactly the same.

-From The New Children by Kira Henehan

Click HERE to read an excerpt of Scott Snyder's story, Dumpster Tuesday