There’s something about my body that doesn’t fully work alone. It must be fear, although I don’t feel like a scared person. It must be shyness, laziness. Or a sense that my body is too fragile to enter an unfamiliar space. I enjoy crossing a threshold as two bodies.
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Cher Accompanies Me to Bury My Mother by Sarah Chin
It’s not like I was expecting Cher to attend my mother’s funeral. That would be crazy, like those people who send their wedding invitations to celebrities and actually think they will attend. I wasn’t crazy. I just wanted to give Cher a chance.
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The Alphabet for Lonely Mammoths by Avery Yue
When your mother opened the door on you, sometimes you would daydream that she wouldn’t find you. She’d inspect each cabinet, then she’d panic and call the whole town to search for you.
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DIG by Laura K. Duncan
Her world kept shrinking. The dream job fell through. The pregnancy failed. People left. But even after it all fell away, Tugboat was still there. She dug faster, throwing clumpy soil aside. Maybe if she made the hole big enough, she could crawl inside there with him.
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Naked Utopia(s) by Claire W. Zhang
Without clothes and names we would all be equals.
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Biohazard by Melissa Benton Barker
Knick doesn’t leave as much of a mess as some of them. It looks like he must have fallen asleep first, or maybe it’s just that he didn’t put up a fight. Deloris says not all of them do.
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Chittagong Chickrassy by Anisha Bhaduri
In the orbs of collaborative self-sufficiency that Hussein Shaheb, his mother and his wife lived in, in the permissiveness that went with accepting boundaries without distasteful confrontation and in the denial that the fatherless, adult man found himself in, he chose the entrenched tragedy of the past.
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The Position of the Sun by Neal Lulofs
I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if my father hadn’t been driving through that intersection at that moment. Would I have stayed in college? Would I have been a better person? What if I had done something the night my sister woke me when we were kids?
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James Garfield Junior High School, Westchester, New York by Michele Zimmerman
At school dances that are themed like blizzards and vampires and under-the-sea creatures, kids will hear phantom noises in bathroom stalls and other kids will scare their friends with screams. It will become generational knowledge that Johnny H. never left the bathroom stall in the hallway next to the small gym.
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Composition by Sharon Gusky
Barbie and Ken aren’t together much these days. Ken is often with another doll he has met. Barbie knows this, too. You could not say that “the other” is taller, or slimmer, or more beautiful than Barbie. Barbie and her look alike, except for their hair color.
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Ribs by Miles Parnegg
They pass the Styrofoam cups of potato salad laced with dill, and sometimes go for the banana pudding shingled with vanilla wafers. That is the point, the sharing. They’ve grown tired of individuating, making protective decisions, catering to specific tastes.
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Bodies Leashed, Bodies Glanced, Bodies Freed, Bodies Danced by Joe Baumann
His mother’s doppelganger reached the water first. She did not break her stride. There was no fanfare, no grandiose gesture at the miracle of it all. She simply kept walking, her gait keeping its same rhythm as her feet set onto the shifting, slurping water as it rolled in and out.
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Heat Wave by Madeline Furlong
I could have gone to a bar; I could have skated down to the water and lit up and watched the lake waves. I could have rented a car and driven up to Caroline’s mother’s, banged on the door, refused to leave until Caroline came out. But soon I was standing in front of Cinema 17. The marquee listed one more showing.
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A Hospitable Man by Theodora Ziolkowski
The kind of man Cathy imagined would pursue an eleven-year-old should be tall and fit. He ought to wear fitted washed jeans, his button-up sleeves rolled loosely. His fingers should be stacked with rings, and a tattoo should climb the side of his neck, his forearm or bicep. But the man who’d sought out Cathy was short and stocky. His pasty skin had a sheen that made it look extra malleable, like putty.
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Notes on an Apology by Scott Ditzler
I told myself it wasn’t my responsibility. I told myself it wasn’t my fault, and grabbed my flannel off the back of the chair, the bag of scripts off the sink. I found my jeans at the foot of the bed, my shoes, my cigarettes, and I walked out into the cold.
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Requesting A Transfer To A New Family Group by Heather Bartos
"Once it's official, start packing. Submit two copies of your letter of resignation. One goes to your parents, for their records."
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Dreamlover by Ciara Alfaro
The last story Milena gave me was unlike all the rest. In it, a girl stood trapped on the strip of land between a lagoon and the sea, the sky black overhead, the cranes out to get her.
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The Food Taster by Matt Leibel
The food taster is fulfilled in her job in a way she knows most others are not. Something about this makes her uneasy. Something about this makes her ravenous for more.
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Crime Scene By J.R. Chapple
She’d been so good at laying still. Good at being frightened. During one of her early jobs, a gig where she’d started off alive, breathing long enough to be assaulted, the man had been so careful, making an effort to talk to her between takes
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The Scorpion by Leila Khaleghi
“Hello, old friend,” she whispered into the void. The fullness inside her swelled. She never imagined that she would have welcomed his well-armored companionship. But how different he seemed this time, a herald of harmony rather than hostility. A true friend. Oh, how good it was to see him.
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