The Brussels Review (2025)

15/08/2025

The emotional core of The Bet by C. Christine Fair is a daughter's relentless, decades-long pursuit of identity and belonging amid the ruins of a brutal childhood. From the earliest memories of being called "Bob’s bastard" by her abusive stepfather to the humiliating discovery of her own conception wagered over a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Chrissy’s story unfolds with devastating honesty. Her mother, unable or unwilling to protect her, wielded the story of "the bet" both as cautionary tale and emotional cudgel—until Chrissy, in defiance, sets out to discover the truth herself. “Chrissy. You need to know one thing… You weren’t born out of love. You were born on a bet. A bet over a PBR six pack.” The revelation is both devastating and liberating, confirming the myth while forever altering the terms of survival. Told with extraordinary clarity, restraint, and unflinching courage, this memoir charts a path through betrayal, rage, and ultimately, a fractured understanding of truth.

A daughter's harrowing search for truth, love, and her father, forged in trauma and betrayed by a mother’s myth.

14/08/2025

In John F Lavelle's essay, a motorcycle ride across Brittany leads to more than just the ancient stones of the Cairn de Barnénez; it becomes a meditation on authenticity, history, and the nature of seeing. In Going to the Cairn, John F. Lavelle resists the tidy prescriptions of guidebooks and the travel elite, arguing instead for a broader palette of experience: “Motorcycle riding does this to a person… you decompress and expand out of the tight, compact person society has made you. It is a freedom seldom felt.” As Lavelle winds through misty roads, camera stores, and subtle critiques of cultural tourism, what emerges is a portrait of a traveler reaching beyond surface aesthetics toward the quiet, often elusive shape of the past and its meanings—refusing replicas, rejecting easy classifications, and privileging what endures.

“Motorcycle riding does this to a person… you decompress and expand out of the tight, compact person society has made you. It is a freedom seldom felt.”

06/08/2025

Three extraordinary tales unravel the layered inner lives of characters caught at their thresholds: a young woman dreams of escaping her rubber estate for the edge of the world, only to find that desire itself is a cartographic invention; a husband seeks refuge in the arms of virtual women until the sound of his wife's laughter recalls him to the unbearable beauty of presence; and a man literally turned into stone learns that true liberation is born not from movement, but from the fierce clarity of choice. "There was no need for Ayappan, her fat-moled sweetheart, her mad mother, her toddy-sodden father, her alienated siblings. The edge of the world was beyond Malaya, beyond all of this, beyond the prospect of even breathing." Each story is sharp with wit and shadowed with ache, pulling us into the intimate places where longing and reckoning meet.

‘The edge of the world is where things happen,’ Ayappan told his lover Kalaivani under a tapped rubber tree one early, very early morning. She didn’t actually

27/07/2025

A mother’s spine shattered in a Nebraska ditch. A young neurosurgeon with limited experience proposes a rare, high-risk procedure. Her son—a seasoned healthcare professional—fights a rising tide of doubt and helplessness. “The most crucial elements of the images, like their decisions, are not black or white. They’re gray—a shade between the certainty of white’s brightness and black’s darkness.” This extraordinary narrative navigates the slow-motion clarity of crisis, the unknowable calculus of risk, and the soft emergence of trust. Amid black-and-white scans and indecipherable CVs, the author discovers the fragile, luminous line between skepticism and faith.

After a near-fatal crash, a son confronts medicine’s uncertainties and learns to trust the young surgeon who holds his mother's life in his hands.

26/07/2025

In a quietly searing account of survival and moral reckoning, David R. Low reflects on the Almaty protests of early 2022 from the confines of a Soviet-era apartment block overlooking Republic Square. “At that moment, everything was hellish, like something from an apocalyptic painting. The explosions I heard, I would learn later, were stun grenades.” What begins as a return to a beloved city becomes a descent into siege and fear: tear gas seeping through the windows, gunfire becoming background noise, and hunger replaced by the numb rhythm of chaos. Amid the silence of a blacked-out internet and the fragility of makeshift bonds, this story probes what it means to witness violence, to be unsure of one's right to trauma, and to see firsthand the cost of political unrest. It is neither polemic nor memoir, but something quieter and more unsettling—an attempt to describe the indescribable and to remember what must not be forgotten.

A harrowing, firsthand account of the Almaty unrest in winter 2022, navigating isolation, violence, and uncertainty amid a city in collapse.

20/07/2025

In Sis Byers’s Forbidden Passions, a woman’s unexpected entanglement with a box of donated romance novels becomes the fulcrum for an emotional and spiritual reckoning. Once a skeptic of love stories, Roz finds herself consumed by their forbidden intensity, compelled not by the plots but by the desire they awaken—something long dormant in her own life. As domestic chaos and invisible labor crush her spirit, she discovers fleeting rebellion behind locked bedroom doors, in the hush of stolen hours, and through a high-speed burst of freedom on small-town roads. She couldn’t remember when her blood throbbed for someone. When longing kept her up at night—if it ever kept her up at night. Quietly blistering and impeccably observed, this story navigates the inner architecture of a woman’s dissatisfaction and longing with unflinching clarity.
Art cover by Mia Feliç

A restless mother finds unexpected escape and desire in a box of romance novels, unlocking a passion she never knew she needed.

12/07/2025

Facing the legacy of empire through shared song, Facing Uncomfortable Truths While Changing the World One Song at a Time is a deeply personal, clear-eyed narrative of a choral tour that becomes something far greater: an exploration of historical complicity, cross-cultural kinship, and the moral weight of memory. As Peter Thorlichen recounts encounters with British gospel choirs, Windrush descendants, and powerful exhibitions on slavery, the music of SANS (Sharing A New Song) weaves a bridge between cultures and centuries. In the Bristol Museum, where a sign asked, “Was this building built on money from slavery?” the chorus sang: I open my mouth to the Lord / and I won’t turn back / I will go, I shall go / to see what the end is going to be. The journey—guided by their Black British host Carlton Walker—confronts injustice past and present, culminating in a rare mutual vulnerability that embodies both truth-telling and hope.

An intimate travel memoir exploring music, memory, and reckoning with colonial histories through transformative cross-cultural connections in modern England.

10/07/2025

Brettany DiMatteo’s personal essay, “The Pain of Hunger,” offers an unflinching meditation on deprivation and its enduring effects across generations. Recounting her grandfather’s childhood in an Arkansas orphanage during the Great Depression, the essay details how hunger carves itself into memory and identity, shaping not only the body but also the heart. Through the lens of family stories—of abandonment, loss, and self-sacrifice—the author probes the inheritance of pain and resilience, asking what is passed down when food and love are scarce. As DiMatteo writes, “Hunger leaves an impression on you that you can’t forget. Even when you aren’t still hungry. Even in his 80s, my grandfather wouldn’t waste any type of food. Not only would he not waste it, but he would risk getting sick over food as long as it was eaten.” This essay is a testament to the quiet heroism of survival and the imperfect love that binds generations, reminding us that every life is defined as much by what is endured as by what is cherished.

“Hunger leaves an impression on you that you can’t forget. Even when you aren’t still hungry. Even in his 80s, my grandfather wouldn’t waste any type of food. Not only would he not waste it, but he would risk getting sick over food as long as it was eaten.”

06/07/2025

A god, wry and unsparing, emerges to dispute the anatomy-obsessed heresies of Dr. Allie Sheets, exposing not only the hollow spectacle of human vanity but the very mechanism by which history itself is forged—a mechanism of longing, misrecognition, and the endlessly refracted images in the “labyrinth nest of mirrors.” In this searching, caustic monologue, by Blake Blaylock, the narrative voice drags human frailty, the hunger for meaning, and the seductions of power into a ruthless light:
“I dwell forever in the midst of a labyrinth nest of mirrors. The labyrinth spans both time and your silly politics, too, and the only way to navigate it is by interpreting through the language of the heart. I hid myself here on account of my body odor being so wretched—f**king awful, really. My hope, in the primordial eons, was that none of you would ever come looking for me. But in the hollows of your hearts must have been interpreted a need for me, for ever since the stringing of the first set of vocal cords your kind has been crying out nonstop, beseeching me in the midst of all manner of calamity, from the battlefields of mass slaughter to the slow-moving checkout lines at your local grocer. Night and day, your kind call out to me, never suspecting that I might not want to be found.” The result is a philosophical satire that interrogates the blindnesses of both faith and doubt, offering no comfort but a cold, persistent clarity.

A sardonic god refutes an optometrist’s theory of history, unraveling illusions, power, and the mirrors of the human heart with acerbic candor.

06/07/2025

"In the past few years, I’ve come to realize that letting go of my childhood concept of God does not preclude me from recognizing the inherent wonders of human existence. Nowadays, when someone asks me what I believe, this is what I say: 'I believe in Mystery.' Then I add, because they can’t see the word as I see it in my mind. 'With a capital M.'"

A reflective essay by Julie Boutwell-Peterson, tracing the evolution of personal belief—from the certainties of childhood faith through the unraveling of inherited stories, toward the quiet recognition of ambiguity and change. “A Question of Belief” explores the rituals, metaphors, and collective fictions we inherit and outgrow, and the enduring human need for meaning even as certainty recedes.

A luminous meditation on belief, memory, and loss—tracing a journey from religious certainty to the embrace of uncertainty, and the enduring need for meaning.

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