Claire Miye Stanford CRYSTALLIZATION The ice begins as a wrinkle at the edge of the lake, a threading of needles in the brush and the reeds. The slightest breeze will break its burgeoning corporeality, fracturing it into shards and then into nothing, causing it to rejoin the water, to resume that liquid shape. It […]
Category / Fiction
Kelly Ann Jacobson Angel My father is the one who named me; perhaps it’s his fault I fell. Black En masse, we are the blank space around a black hole. Devoid of even dust, we stand stripped and wait for gravity to pull us down. Children When they call me, they are all business. […]
Madeline Stevens She wakes to the man cursing, the car sputtering over to the side of the road. She tries to remember his name—it’s along the lines of Paul or John, one of Jesus’ apostles, she remembers that. A medallion hangs from the rear view mirror, a flash of gold that stings the topmost […]
Tara Campbell A woman wanted to give birth because her life was too perfect. Other women had trauma, children, husbands who mistreated them. She had money, independence, serenity, but nothing to write about. The woman sat down and told herself she’d failed because she wasn’t a mother. She concentrated, holding her belly, but couldn’t […]
Joseph Moldover The beach was a sliver of mud, and two figures struggled from the woods down to the water’s edge. The man wore boots and canvas pants, but the boy was in sneakers and shorts and his legs were already dirty. The man set down a tackle box and two rods. He looked […]
Julie A. Hersh I walked too far in the desert one night and got lost. I came to a house in a dark patch of something else and walked closer, to its huge black gate surrounding a steel patio. It was enormous, woody, stony. I gripped the gates to get a better look and […]
Holly Pelesky With a clatter. You will drop your coffee cup and the ceramic will shatter onto the orange linoleum and the shards will look up at you and you will look down at them, at the hot coffee splattered on your ankles. Don’t mop it up. Leave a note: I wanted to love […]
Joe Cary No one’s made a move yet among the hushed chatter and as we pitch and yaw something from the overhead bins caroms off my shoulder and I stare uncertain at my pen, safe in my grip, the fancy one she gave me on our first birthday together, Every aspiring writer needs a good […]
Cara Dempsey Was I freaked at first? Shit, yeah. You know how it is. You’ve been stuck at a company too long. You were just about to quit when, suddenly, they laid you off. No way you can afford your place. So you spend weeks boxing up your life, throwing out all the little […]
Amy Stuber It happens on the 42 bus, right after I email the woman I work for, Ellen, practically the thousandth email of the day because she requires that level of attention, and her auto-reply tells me she’ll be “traveling internationally with family for two weeks and so may be delayed in responding.” I […]
Sarah Creech Child’s Pose On a warm summer night when the smell of trampled grass permeates the air and lightning bugs light the dark woods with blinking gold flecks, a girl runs barefoot through the neighborhood streets, feet padded by callouses, chasing boys down concrete walks, up small hills where humble ranch houses stand like […]
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Alyssa Claire Greene In the dark of the premiere, you’ll watch credits roll over a high school prettier than the one you went to. You’ll read the names of actors ten years older than you were when it happened. You’ll wait patiently for those words: BASED ON A TRUE STORY. When things get going, you’ll […]
Dana Cann A dream lingers. Death marches. The world sleeps. Except middle-aged men with enlarged prostates. He turns the knob on the stovetop. The starter clicks—once, twice—and the flame bursts, like lungs pushing air through closed lips. When he was young, a freshman, there was a fire in his dorm. He woke to smoke […]
Gary Fincke During the summer after seventh grade, when we were alone for an afternoon, no chance of being caught, silk was what we sought in Ted Needham’s older sister’s room. We held her silk and named girls we knew who might be slipping off the slick things we touched: Negligees, panties, lace-trimmed slips […]
Michelle Bailat-Jones In America people say, easy come easy go. In America people say, don’t waste your breath. Here, though. Sofia closes the door to her apartment at the end of the day and the silence wraps around her like a sweater a size too small. Soft, but pressing. Against breastbone, against stomach, a band […]
Siân Griffiths for Gwendolyn That night, she danced with aliens. They spoke to her in math. In school, she was learning multiplication tables and isolation; she understood whispers as sound waves measuring the distance between planets. School math was rote. Alien math worked on another logic, requiring no memory. Their three-step time altered her heart’s […]
Ellen Rhudy She was a dead man’s child, she would have been half-ghost, half-human, she never had a chance. I told Tom he couldn’t come to the appointments, so I sat alone while the nurses gelled my stomach. She looked healthy on the sonograms, but I carried her with dread. There are ways of […]
