Maggie Nye The Witches of Suburbia think all women’s bodies are beautiful except their own. They don’t eat that, but you totally can. They really want to be inclusive, but they don’t know how to find friends who are different from them. Like you can’t just walk up to someone and be like, Hey, I […]
Category / Fiction
Ryan Bradford You can see it from the highway: a painted crocodile—fifty feet tall—beckons us into its mouth. The hot peal of desert wind makes the croc’s hanging saliva look refreshing, like we could hold our hands out and wait for it to drop. “Borrego Crocodile Farm.” Cassie stretches, revealing a bellybutton jewel and damp […]
Samuel J Adams Babysitters came and babysitters went and if we needed one babysitter to go away faster than another we showed them the butter fridge. Our parents were gourmet bakers and cookbook authors and maddened hoarders and so quite naturally they overstocked our basement fridges with sticks of butter: Irish Butter, Minnesotan Butter, Belgian […]
Lynn Mundell Sitting Lisa del Giocondo has bunions, is prone to depression, and is unfashionably thin for the 1500s. She does have beautiful skin, as though lit up from a candle within her. And her hair is an interesting, brooding cloud around her long face. Perhaps that is why the painter asks her to sit […]
Lindsay Fowler When the women bring their mothers, their mothers check everything for lumps. They run their hands over the upholstery in the waiting room and over the creases of every grease-thumbed magazine. When the women pull the magazines from their mothers, burying their faces in the feature article on p. 32, their mothers walk […]
Miranda Gonzalez “Woman stabs man over custody dispute,” The Albuquerque Journal headline reads. “Man in critical condition recovering from knife wound sustained while attempting to pick up his child at the five-hundredth block of Cedar Street at approximately 12:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, APD reports.” In a picture above the article, a single-story stucco house sits […]
Carolyn Oliver Prudence Mayweather was vomiting when the Hindenburg sailed over our high school. I was holding back her hair. The lavatory windows were open to the mild October morning, and I could hear the swarm of the airship’s engines mellowing the crowd of our classmates and teachers into awestruck silence. Friday morning’s paper ran […]
Alyssa Quinn A man in Wisconsin flew fake airplanes on a computer in his basement. There was a joystick on his desk, a green screen draped across the wall, many maps with vectors sketched in pink and blue. He broadcast his flights live, and people, lots of people, watched. He established a fan base. There […]
Jean-Luc Bouchard The man working the concession stand was very ugly, and when he saw me standing by myself he gave a smile of solidarity. By attending the movies alone in the middle of the day, I believed I had already laid bare the quality of my life, but he still felt it necessary to […]
John Nardone You are a student in a prominent low-residency MFA program and an aspiring writer. Your work has been published or is forthcoming in 4 a.m. Fiction, Millennia, and Intersections, and you have served as an editor and book reviewer. You are also the co-host of the literary podcast You Are Not Alone. You […]
Caleb Tankersley When we felt the call, we gathered, Earth’s mightiest in the underground lair. This purple guy with issues soared in from across the galaxy, tried to wipe out half the population. We heroes fought like hell, got ourselves pretty banged up, some of us barely alive. We prevailed in the end, as we […]
Noa Sivan The American Dream They are eleven people living in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City. Childhood friends—kindred dreamers—refugees of a civil war. At night they sleep head-to-toe on the bed, couch, or floor. In the morning they joke as if they didn’t hear one another scream. Whole and Perfect The […]
Michelle Meyers As you know, today our class was supposed to discuss the 2008 economic recession and the subsequent bank bailout. We were supposed to discuss liquidation squeezes, credit default swaps, toxic assets, and the real estate bubble. We were supposed to discuss the Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. […]
Christine Hennessey Raquel is not a marine biologist, but she can tell right away that the whale washed up on Bellhaven Beach is dying. It’s late winter and the wind gusts, cutting through her coat as she walks along the shore. She doesn’t notice the whale until she’s almost on top of it, which seems […]
Patrick Walczy We’d seen previews of his dancing at the company holiday party, clucking and sliding on the dance floor with his girlfriend, but now, in his cubicle, he gave us a full dose. Kept shouting, “Yes!” Kept kissing the framed picture of his girlfriend. Heads popped over cube walls to see if he was […]
Jennifer Wortman I am the woman driving across town to stop the wedding of the man I love. Because I am now this woman, he’s getting married in a big, steepled church. The man I love hates church, and marriage. But now he’s getting married in a big, steepled church to a woman who isn’t […]
James Yates They planned to meet at the train station that morning. Thomas had read tips online, that it was a good place to hook up; he hadn’t gone the dating site or hookup app route. He just couldn’t take any chances. Knowing his own luck, someone, somehow, would find out. He wasn’t ready to […]
Daniel DiFranco “Her Majesty” blared out of a T-Top Camaro. The driver, a man, shirtless, revved the engine. The car screeched off as the light turned green. Two people, early thirties in business attire, crossed the street. One of them could be you or me or someone you know, but since this is a story, […]
Noa Sivan They meet at a bar: an Inuit guy who hates snow and a Tuareg woman traveling with her sled dogs across the frozen land. They fall in love; spend winters in the Sahara, summers in the Arctic. He tells her his father was a depressed hunter, couldn’t kill a living creature—skinned a carcass […]
Jeff Bakkensen We split her up by dropping names into a hat. I got both arms, Paul a leg, Ryan the head, Matt the other leg, and Drew the coveted torso. Then we split for our various cities, Paul and I to New York, Matt to L.A., Ryan to Boston, and Drew to London. We […]
