July | Freyja Hellebust

"The city during the summer is golden and dripping, syrupy slow, and the days taste sweet, like clementines or peaches, the juice running in sticky rivers down forearms, chins..."

Septimus | Lucie Bonvalet

"Septimus had always had a fondness for cephalopods. The poetry of suction cups, the grace of tentacles, the strangeness of their beaks, the mysterious flexibility of their heads..."

Disorientation | Suman Mallick

"I wanted to stop worrying about the Scylla of finding new donors like the businessman and the Charybdis of salary reductions and cutting our already meager staff, and I wanted to live a little while there was still living to be had..."

The Kaleidoscope | Katie Curran

"I heard that boy had run away, yes, run away, with something dangerous, yes, dangerous, I said, he was last spotted round this corner, this very one, yes, he had an instrument under his arm, what Jimmy called: a kaleidoscope."

Bodies in the Storm | Lerato Ramodike

"Abdullah thinks of the olive tree growing in the backyard that he used to have. How, a week after the airstrike, his wife had gone back to search for an olive to plant. She found that the entire tree had burned down. She wept as though she had lost a son..."

Variations on Three Fables by Aesop | Lillie Franks

"One winter the grasshopper came to the anthill and begged for food. The ants refused for personal reasons, and that was their affair. The grasshopper decided to grow weaker and die, alone, in the cold, and that was its affair..."