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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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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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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LGM-1 by Robert Paul Weston
From my window, I watched the pool’s plastic pit return to its former glory. Only when the refurbishment was complete, the pool refilled and made usable, did I discover Cathy existed, that the dull-but-probably-well-to-do couple next door had a daughter the same age as Gretchen Lowe.
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Minor Lightning by Victoria Barrett
We walk straight toward the things we want or need or have to reach, leaving a wake of our longing in the bare dirt behind us. We roll our eyes at the olds’ advice to slow down, to “savor,” such corny bullshit, we’ll slow down, maybe, when we arrive.
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Henrietta by Dan Shields
Scuttling toward me with the fat pink knuckles of her claws, assembled inside the shell I’d just thrown. Her body at home in the ugliness I’d created. She was my best friend instantly. I named her Henrietta.
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Horses by Walter Weinschenk
"We run as one, staunch, impassive, each of us different, all the same: bay, roan, pinto, palomino, as many types as there are dreams imaginable but we rush as one array, jet-like above the gravely ground at horse-speed, a single panoply that thrusts forth in perpetual motion and straight pursuit, headlong into pitiless wind"
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Aquifer by Sean Theodore Stewart
"When I spoke, I surprised myself by saying things I had been too bashful to admit to the aquifer before. I gushed. I waited for her response. The water enveloped me."
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Orchid Children by Becky Hagenston
They sprouted leafy tufts around their necks, their feet took on a moldy sheen, their toenails were atrocious. You couldn’t keep these children inside.
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Foreign Objects by Lexi Pandell
A horse can grow a stone in its stomach the size of a grapefruit.
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A Woman Without Origin by Elaine Hsieh Chou
The woman went abroad and began to lose her grip on things.
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Mermaids by Emily Lowe
They cut the tongues out quickly, cleanly, like a wire through wet clay.
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Sowing Ground by Elliot Alpern
Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
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Soulcraft by Larry Flynn
She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead.
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Father Francisco Makes a Friend by Charles Haddox
Amid the maize and sugarcane fields, the village looked like a collection of cupboards painted white and left out to dry in the wind. Barking echoed over cactus and discarded glass bottles. Sunday mornings in San Juan Camotlán were usually quiet as a broken-down motorbike.
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Backwards T-Shirt by Genevieve Abravanel
It was like the old days—the earliest days—those chatrooms where lines of text concealed everything except your wit or the way it unraveled but they had already unraveled, now that everyone was home-bound except those who didn’t and got caught by the authorities and everyone wanted that job.
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