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  Then suddenly beech woods, all green behind the dozing eyes a deer leaps across the forest road scents of acid and moss and cheek against bark, sunrain between trunks, I'm home and hear the Baltic Sea crash against big rocks far away and I rest like a fairy or a witch in the sweet smells of the forest floor we can so easily forget what we are who we are that we are, but it takes only a little call to waken the sleepers, as now, in the forest, for LISTEN,...

It struck me later on that, just for a second, I had been off my guard. I lifted my hand in order to scratch the back of my neck. It was only when I brought it back to the armrest that I realized what had happened. At that instant, the young man in the seat next to me had pushed his own arm there. When they provide one seat per person couldn’t they provide two armrests in between? If they don’t provide that much, how can they claim it’s a luxury bus? I was on my way from...

A pane of glass shatters. I open my bedroom window and look up and down the street. A man is running away. Under the kitchen table I find a rock the size of a baby’s fist. I push the larger fragments of glass into a pile by the wall with the toe of my slipper, then get a broom and sweep up the smaller shards. I don’t want to run the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the night, so I leave it at that and go back to bed. Did you see who it was? My wife asks, lying with her back to...

The place had opened for business at eleven a.m. but no one showed up. The old man wasn’t surprised, though, since Thursdays were often like this. But when nine p.m. came and went and there were still no customers, he decided to close up, and switched off the wall lights. With no games being played, he could hear the cooling compressor of the Coke machine humming noisily. It was the kind of vending machine with glass bottles, the kind of old-fashioned dispenser his maintenance man had...

Now was the time to leave. She could go anywhere, as long as there were streets. Just had to walk to get there. These feet would take her. Though they weren’t as good as they used to be. Oh Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai! Where have you come from, and where are you going? I am running from my mistress Sarai, she answered. This road was here before they paved it. The rain left it muddy, pockmarked by puddles. She had walked this street every day, ever since she was a girl. Quite a few...

Under my skin, my father invades me. Quietly, slowly: in my striated nails, along the fat visible vein, in my stomach that has succumbed, in my scrotum that has loosened, he flakes off my skin that dries out and wrinkles under my armpits. In my face, my eyes face the invader’s transfusion and it’s still to be confirmed whether in the last days’ light he will stay or shoot off before I resign myself to him. From the collection Lar. © Armando Freitas...

“I can’t seem to remember her,” the man said in anguish. “I can’t remember her face or her body or her voice—that voice that I once adored. I have this mental image that her voice was pleasing, but the sound isn’t there. Do you understand? How can you be in love with someone whom you can’t seem to remember? We’ve only been separated for six months.” (The psychologist jotted something down in his notepad that passed unnoticed by...