The Long Drive to Nowhere
It was late July, and the heat had settled over the desert like a blanket that wouldn’t lift. Our family was driving to my aunt’s place, a small house on...
It was late July, and the heat had settled over the desert like a blanket that wouldn’t lift. Our family was driving to my aunt’s place, a small house on...
The road unfurled like a black tongue through the pine barrens, and Elena’s Civic ate the miles with a hungry hum. Beside her, Marcus rode shotgun, his thumb tracing the...
The first time I saw him, I thought he was just a trick of the light. I was nine, spending the summer with my grandmother in the hill town of...
In 1994, when I was nine, my family moved from the bustling streets of Brooklyn to the quiet outskirts of Chiang Mai. My mother, who had grown up in a...
The day Elias finally stopped crying over his grandfather’s death, the sky opened up and wept with him. He stood on the front porch of the house he had inherited,...
The industrial park’s west lot was a dead zone after 5 PM, a wide asphalt apron bordered by a rusted chain-link fence and a thicket of dying sycamores. Marcus usually...
My name is Leo, and three nights ago I was in the coastal town of San Cristobal, a place where the ocean fog never fully lifts and the locals lock...
Tha Phra Chan, otherwise Talad Phra Chan is a market where all kinds of weird amulets are sold. Some even say that the place even sold Kuman Thong (the amulets...
First of all let me explain what I understand about Sak Yant. Sak Yant are varieties of Thai Tattoos designs related to Thai Buddhist and Buddhist Mantras in Thai culture....
My name is Elias Thorne, and I was a locksmith by trade, a man who believed every mechanism had a logical explanation. My shop, ‘Thorne’s Keys & Repairs,’ sat at...
The first thing that struck me about the Sea Breeze Apartments was the smell of salt and brine, a lingering essence of the nearby docks that seemed to permeate the...
The first night in Chiang Mai was a raw wound of sleeplessness. Marta and I, fresh from São Paulo, lay in our hotel room, the air thick with the scent...
Mira never spoke of the winter she spent at the old Harlow place, not until the nightmares started. She’d told Elias bits and pieces, enough to explain why she flinched...
When Lena and I signed the lease on that apartment, we thought we’d found a miracle. The price was almost insultingly low for a place that sprawled across an entire...
This was when my family still lived in a small town in the highlands of northern Vietnam. I was about five years old. My older brother, who was eight, had...
The night air was thick with the smell of rain and diesel from the harbor below. I leaned against the rusted railing of our balcony on the 14th floor, a...
The salt-stained walls of the Blue Meridian Hotel on Ko Lipe had absorbed decades of monsoon rain and tourist sweat. I’d chosen it for its balcony view of the Andaman...
I’ve always been drawn to quiet places where the past lingers like dust on old furniture. My name is Mara, and I grew up in a small village nestled in...
My mother’s surgery at the sprawling St. Aurelia’s Medical Center in the outskirts of Marseille had gone well, but the doctors insisted she remain for observation in the old wing....
My great-uncle Elias passed away in the autumn of 2016, while hiking the remote trails of the Scottish Highlands. He was a solitary man, a retired botanist who had spent...
The night air of Chiang Mai clung to me like a damp shroud as I stumbled out of a late-night bar on Suthep Road, just past the canal where the...
The clock on my nightstand said 3:47 AM, which was normal for me these days. Since the mill shut down, my nights had become a gray blur of insomnia and...
In October 2019, I was studying for my master’s degree in Coastal Ecology at the University of Tromsø. For my thesis, I was researching the long-term effects of a catastrophic...
Our house in the outskirts of Chiang Mai sat on a plot of land that had been fallow for decades, flanked by a mango orchard and a forgotten moat. My...
Listening to the woods...
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