I sign up for summer class at the community college so I can finally get my associates, and on the first day I see a girl who reminds me of my old babysitter. I sit in front of the girl, by the window and pretend to look at the traffic passing on Mountain View, but really I’m watching her reflection. Chapped pink lips. Tattoo edging up her collarbone. Hair everywhere and the color of daffodils, all drawn out faint and slippery over the glass.
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Speed by Maria Kuznetsova
We were spying on my parents. This was something we started a few weeks ago, when I noticed that they were worth spying on.
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Here I Am by Xu Xi
He was not a zombie. Nor was he a ghoul, mummy, wraith, ambulatory skeleton, or operatic phantom. He wasn’t even 殭 屍 (geong si), a dressed-to-the-nines Qing dynasty vampire that could at least do an approximation of the Lindy Hop, transcending time and culture into the Jazz Age. However, he was clearly dead, or undead, if you parsed language to its core.
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White Birds by Jennifer Zeynab Maccani
What do the dancing white birds say, looking down upon burnt meadows?
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BodSwap with Moses by Wendy Rawlings
Manuela in scrub top and cheetah pants hasn’t even finished telling us what to expect from our new bodies when the Kenyans stride in on their excellent legs.
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Fall by Marysa LaRowe
It started with the birds.
It was New Year’s Eve. We were sitting in the living room, watching the footage of fireworks in Australia, Tel Aviv, Berlin, London. Outside, people were setting off fireworks and bottle rockets of their own. You’d hear them whistle and pop every now and then, first far away, then close.
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The News by C. Dale Young
The potted ficus in the corner of Flora Diaz’s kitchen, the ficus barely four-feet tall and planted in a rust-colored ceramic pot, the one that she watered every six days had, for the first time in the almost four decades she had owned it, started showing some yellowing leaves. This did not escape Flora Diaz’s attention. Nor had it escaped Javier Castillo’s attention; he made a point of pointing it out when he first told me about that particular time in his life.
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Rest Stop by Ana Crouch Ureña
Since I can remember, I’ve spent summers at my grandmother’s house on the coast. It’s a long drive, but this year will be the last time I make it. Mimi died in the spring. I was so upset, I even told my students about her. I was as surprised as they to find myself recounting how Mimi came to the US as a war bride. Really, I knew almost nothing about it; she never talked about that time.
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Down on the Ass Farm by Samuel Ligon
Remember how we’d handle snakes, diamondbacks and cottonmouths, praying we’d be okay someday and away from this place? We’d quote from scripture, glowing with the words we whispered: And they will take up snakes, and if they should drink lethal poison, it will not harm them, and they will place their hands on the sick. But we didn’t place our hands on the sick. And we didn’t drink lethal poison. We drank Father Tim’s whiskey and placed our hands on each other, saying yes to darkness and drink and the pleasures of the flesh. Do you remember?
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Hood by Sohrab Homi Fracis
1981 was a bad year for a Parsi to come to America. The Iran hostage crisis had left Americans with a smoldering resentment of foreigners. “Go home!” Viraf was told.
Not to his South Bombay stomping grounds: Marine Drive, Churchgate, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Cuffe Parade, Eros, CCI, Colaba. Not to Seth Building and his loved ones: Mum, Dad, Mamaiji—best not to even think of Maya.
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California is Sinking by Martin Ott
California is Sinking by Martin Ott
It was water draining, earthquakes kissing in the shade of the moon winking in tune with the marionettes of Godzilla tap dancing for dinner. It was the office pool being rigged before the steering column in the ribs, the storage shed turned into a homeless brig, the matador’s cape or baby’s bib hung in the closet or on a billboard begging for consideration, the fib that became the real story rehashed until time lost its will. It was the small screen sucking us in, the vodka gimlet transformed into gin, the famed taco truck up in smoke that we followed for years, the treasure in limbo just beyond the beyond, the yolk discarded in the heart-smart omelet. It was the drone sent out for cigarettes by the director lost in the desert. It was the lost scene in Steinbeck’s last work. It was the invisible collapse of the land’s face, stretched taut like an actor turned professional patient. It was the hidden reservoir beneath the migrants streaming into the void. It was the crash that no one heard and the warnings we pretended to ignore.
Martin Ott is the author of six books of poetry and fiction, including the poetry book Underdays, Sandeen Prize Winner, University of Notre Dame Press and the short story collection Interrogations, Fomite Press. More at www.martinottwriter.com.
Not in Nottingham by Mary Kuryla
While my hostess sat across the glass kitchen table fanning away the smell of diarrhea exploding from one of two recently adopted kittens mewling on the other side of the screen door, while my six-year-old son, also on the other side of the screen door, finally took the turn he’d never been offered to mount his friend’s toy arrow in a bow, while the boy he’d come to play with, the boy named after the Hindu principal of cosmic order, abandoned my son in favor of his brother, I began wondering why I’d agreed to take a kid like mine on a playdate.
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The Epigenetics of Barbie: a short story by Ann S. Epstein
My five-year-old niece June wears a 24-E bra. Not to play dress-up, but because she needs one to support her breasts. Mellie, who is my sister and June’s mother, blames me because I gave June a Barbie doll two months ago. That’s when her mammary development began. You see, my niece has been assuming the characteristics of toys and games since she was born. For example, her eyes took on the Calder-like shapes and swivel movements of the wind-up mobile above her crib.
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Oracle: a short story by Alia Volz
I cannot make you understand how much I love this place. I love our houses the color of sand, so you can look over the town from up on Mt. Lemmon and almost miss it. I love that everyone knows my name. When I walk into the Oracle Market, Will Whitby says “Hey, Maxine, how are the boys?” Our families go to the same church. It seems like we all did when I was a girl.
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How the Scientists Solved Almost Everything by Mike Anderson Campbell
The day before our father would have died, the Scientists cured cancer. They had a press conference from their secret lab on an Antarctic ice floe.
“We cured cancer,” they announced, then opened the floor to questions.
“How?” a reporter for a Spanish newspaper asked.
“Everyday household items,” the Scientists answered.
“Which cancer did you cure?” asked a South Korean blogger.
“All of them,” said the Scientists. “We cured all of the cancers.”
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Mr. Ambrosio Is an Idiot by George Choundas
Mr. Ambrosio in N252 says if you hold your breath long enough, you’ll pass away. He admits this does nothing for most people, swears and swears it works for those of extreme age. “The superannuated,” he says, show-off. Not true. That is the plan of a child, she is sure. Mr. Ambrosio is an idiot, she is sure.
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MicroDry by Katharine Coldiron
Nothin bout this fella to grab on to. Nothin he tole me yet that takes holda my conversation-maker. Half an hour and there’s nothin he says I can ask him bout.
“Awfully pretty out here in the morning,” he says.
“Yassir,” I says. I’d be a halfwit not to agree, but there ain’t nowhere to go with it. It’s a pretty spot, and I know it, or I wouldn’t take tourists like him out here at the asscrack a dawn to get piddly lil trout to take home with em.
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The End of Coney Island Avenue by Roohi Coudhry
I first came to Coney Island Avenue as a bride. I didn’t know anything about Brooklyn at the time. New York was crowded and noisy, I knew, but it would still be part of the gleaming white First World. We lived above a Pakistani restaurant that fried samosas in stale oil, fumes rising up to our apartment. A sign just under our window proclaimed “Income Tax, Overseas Transfer” in Urdu. I hung my head out the window and read the sign upside down, a pattern without words.
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Night Terrors By Lara N. Ehrlich
June awakens to an echo. The farmhouse and surrounding woods are swathed in darkness punctured only by pinhole stars. What was that sound? It might have been a dream, or the house settling, or a loon in the swamp beyond the woods. The loons scream like women. Their screams shiver and die on the wind. What if someone were dying out there? The sheet has twisted around her legs, and when she peels it from her nightgown, static sparks against her skin. What if someone were dying, and she just pulled her covers over her head?
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Calculating a Body by Bryce Emly
In that full second before flight finds stillness, before head fills with quarters and lungs stretch with dirt and blood, before bone tips split skin, before windshield splinters into stars and car completes its first rotation is everything physics needs to prove: a body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by the gravity of youth; only matter can’t be created or destroyed.
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