As we walked home, I felt like the night had created this stillness just for us. For us and no one else, perhaps as a sort of consolation; there wasn’t another soul around, in any case. We walked as quickly as our tired feet could manage in the middle of the night and probably looked […]
Sunna Dís Másdóttir is a member of the Impostor Poets, a women’s poetry collective, withwhom she has published the poetry collections Ég er ekki að rétta upp hönd, Ég erfagnaðarsöngur and Nú sker ég netin mín. Their novel Olía (Oil) was nominated for the IcelandicLiterary Prize in 2021. Other members of the collective are Fríða […]
FICTION The Quiet Game by Halla Þórlaug Óskarsdóttir I have twice been asked to stop screaming, both times in a hospital. The first time, my mom was dying. The second, my daughter was being born. Both instances are shrouded in fog, like I was in some other world. The first time, it was my brother, […]
FICTION the dip by Örvar Smárason When my fingers started falling off, it became harder and harder to put my shoes on and take them off. After I lost the first two, I switched from laces to Velcro. I used to wear them all the time as a kid, and I’ve always been fascinated by […]
The Little Girl Who Lived on Fish Hearts I once knew a little girl who lived on nothing but fish hearts. She had a bowl
For several months, Sólveig had started every day by playing a little game with herself. She’d wake up exactly 47 seconds before the alarm clock rang, lie completely still in bed, and count down in silence. 47…42, the bus drove past the house; 35, their upstairs neighbour slammed the front door; 21, the nextdoor neighbour […]
The earth’s crust cracked at the poles. Inside, there was nothing but air and the little sun at the core of the planet. When I was a child, you could just barely make out the edge of the North Hole (a lame pun even then) from the northmost tip of Iceland. The only trace of […]
People who travel through space often have poor digestion because their internal clock gets thrown off mid-air. Time travellers such as myself on the other hand, get a ringing in their ears, sometimes long before we even set off. The ringing is constant, a sign of our continual desire to exit the moment. You can […]
You dumped me during a recession. You’d just lost your job at the ad agency. You said you needed to make a radical change in your life, you’d run aground, were stranded, it was over, and yet, you said, you wanted to part on good terms and before I could think whether I wanted to […]
In all Swedish real estate listings, there’s a special note about the property’s distance to water. As if people can only endure a brief amount of time on land before re-immersing themselves. I can picture them, sun-browned and sockless in their shoes, pink sweater arms dangling off the shoulders of slick-haired Swedes, striped skirts whipping […]
