By Selma Carvalho
The Friday they leave for a weekend in Belgium, Anju discovers Freddo is cheating on her. She doesn’t share her knowledge with him. What she should have said was, ‘Freddo, I’m tired of this shit. This time, I’m leaving.’
Her heart feels like it is going to stop breathing all on its own, distinct from the rest of her. The pain is so intense, she realises it is possible for the rest of her body to survive the carnage, while her heart, expelled from her being like a refugee, would simply die.
By Pantaleao Fernandes
Issue no 24
“Last Sunday’s collection was rupees…,” announced the parish priest from the lectern, just before the final blessing of the Sunday Mass. The small group of teenagers listened eagerly, awaiting the announcement of the crib competition…the category, and, of course, the prize. “This year we are deviating from the traditional crib contest in your homes. We have decided to have a live crib competition which will be held on our stage here.
By Sahib Nazari
Issue no 20
An APWT publication
‘We’re vampires,’ said the young barman when I asked if he had a day job, ‘we work after dark and sleep before sunrise. My wife work day time.’ He brushed his black whiskers as thin as his eyelashes. ‘I work night time.’ His slim eyes enveloped dreams and hope, said he had three children, and his parents share their tiny shack with them.
By Dean Kerrison
Issue no 20
An APWT publication
If I could find the proper words to make sense of history and be on the right side, I’d assemble them in a neat package, use them as bricks to build a structure in which to sit and live, because that’s what we do, build armies, empires and arguments, in essays and on Facebook and Twitter threads, crushing the enemy with swords and guns and ad hominem rhetoric, then instead of following Ghenghis Khan’s horse to chew Eurasia…
By Isabelle Li
Issue no 20
An APWT publication
When I hear the sound of approaching traffic, I often think of my father. He's deaf in one ear and has lost most of his hearing in the other. I’m worried how he might cross the road, relying solely on his macula-degenerated eyes, hands clutched behind his back, holding a shabby grocery bag, on his way to the market.
By Tim Tomlinson
Issue no 20
An APWT publication
They’d met at Warp and Weft: Re-weaving Indigenous Cultures into the Fabric of the Philippines, a conference hosted by his department. She was from the Cordillera. She had Bontoc blood. When she presented, she wore a traditional costume, the skirt ablaze with orange, red, and black stripes. The poetry was fierce, eloquent, blunt. No white colonialist dick will ever get inside this brown pussy, she read, and a tremor shook the room.
By Felicio Cardoso
Translated by Augusto Pinto
Issue no 18
It was raining in torrents. It wasn’t all that late in the night but outside, it was pitch dark. At most it must have been about 8 o’clock and the frogs and the crickets had already begun singing their songs. As usual, Caetano, Lawrence, Squinty Jose, and Ram were sitting with a bottle of feni at Pedro’s place chatting away.
By Maria da Rocha
Translated by Paul Melo de Crasto
Issue no 17
Powdery moonlight drifted down on both sides of the Sandalcalo. On its back of ramshackle crenels and collapsed turrets the Old Fort received its due of the moon’s warm caress. Yet it could muster no smile. It could but sigh for the revels of past times, for blackly beaded men toying in the dark with the gossamer-thin clothes of gorgeous banianas… Ena!
By Steve R. E. Pereira
Issue no. 17
‘You have to find a cock, a big, black cock. It has to be black. A very big, black cock. Unaelewa?’ Mai looked fierce as she wagged her finger vigorously in Annie’s face.
‘Naelewa,’ Annie said, trying, not successfully, to hide a smirk as she wrapped her kitenge around her house-dress.
By Janet H Swinney
Issue no 15
Navneen loved everything there was to love about women. Everything. He didn’t object to armpits, for example. Unlike many men, and many women for that matter, he didn’t think of them as zones of unwanted perspiration and offensive odour. When a woman raised her arms, revealing the secrets within those hollows, he always caught his breath.
By Saritha Rao
Issue no. 14
Francisco de Melo Palheta surveyed the roomful of elegant people who had turned up in his honour. Only the French had the audacity to build a villa of this kind in humid Guiana, and the gall to insist on a dress code for dinner that would otherwise befit the salons of Paris.
