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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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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