Today I had a lunch appointment with my old boyfriend who married someone else. I’d called the meeting because I had a discovery to divulge, but he ended up talking the whole time. Then our hour was up, and he left. I’d been too overwhelmed by the physical fact of him to speak.
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An Honest Resume by Brad Eddy
OBJECTIVE
An employment opportunity in marketing, business, hotdog sales or funeral operations (anything with health insurance), or the type of thing that might impress an ex, make her think about things
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Zoo Suicides By Allegra Hyde
The first one hopped the fence into the lion pit. We almost thought it was an accident, what with... you’d be amazed at the stunts people pull for photographs. But then we found a note in the guy’s shoe.
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Independence Day by Joy Castro
An agave can be many things, its tough gray-green spikes frozen in their waving like the stilled arms of an anemone in the desert’s long-parched sea. The bison of the Aztecs, it proffers its lathering innards as soap, its vicious brown-pointed tips to men as arrowheads or to women as threaded needles ready-made (with a strand of fibers left attached), its deep rubbery layers as condoms, its thinner dry sheets near the surface as paper, and its fibers as the thread for weaving, tough but softening with washing and time.
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Devil’s Bridge by Wendy Oleson and Kate McIntyre
"On my bridge, I decide what I like," the devil said. He dangled scaly ankles over the edge of an open platform he’d built of pine under the very center of his bridge, Devil’s Bridge. The platform extended several feet beyond the bridge's edge. To move from bridge to platform, the devil hopped down to the platform's edge. To ascend, he hooked a claw on the bridge and hauled himself up—though only at night so the sun did not hurt his delicate eyes.
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Ascent Phase by Tariq al Haydar
I was in fifth grade when I heard missiles explode in the sky for the first time. During the Gulf War, it became commonplace to hear that air raid siren, which indicated that we had to run to the basement. I was only scared the first time it happened, before we had cleaned the basement, when I thought something bad might happen.
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The Archivist of Baghdad by T.L. Khleif
The archivist read the words again and tried to ignore the stirrings of a new fear.
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Home Inventory after a Tornado (or, Everything We Lost) By Anne Valente
Coffee Maker. $40. Age: 2 years. Location: Kitchen. Purchased by my wife and son as a gift for my 40th birthday, left wrapped on the kitchen counter for me to discover when I woke. Lost beneath debris, beneath mud, beneath so many splinters of wood.
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The Most Famous Drone Pilot in America by Jacob Silverman
Every night he dreams in infrared. Five, six weeks now, the world a thermal scan of itself. The map becomes the territory. A series of targets and the not-yet-threats in between.
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The Other Bill by Steve Almond
When my husband returned from Afghanistan, we hoped our lives might go on much the same as before. Bill hadn’t been in much danger. We’d been married for ten years. We had the support of good friends and a large extended family. Our two little ones were healthy, and within a few months of his return, a third was on the way. It didn’t seem unreasonable.
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Critical Mass by Roxane Gay
Jean-Richard and Elsie Moreau had lived in Palmetto Landing for nearly seven years when they heard the news, by way of Ellen Katz, that another Haitian family was moving into the community—doctors, three children, two still at home, new money and a lot of it.
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I am the Devil by Laura Pritchett
I use an oven, not a hairdryer. It blows my mind. Happy. Obviously, the fumes from this are gonna make you sick.
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