When Petra was little her papa hurt her, and so she put her heart in bubble wrap. Layer upon layer upon layer of unspooled, suffocating plastic that padded her vital organ in an impenetrable fortress that could go anywhere, endure anything, no matter the fragility of its contents. Pigtails, lollypops, and monkey bar skills, that was her, but she performed her brutal surgery all the same.
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Exit 105 by Lindsay Haber
Glen’s wasn’t one of those fucking cliché cancer stories. It wasn’t fighting for survival, lamenting with his wife and kids, telling everyone to go on without him. Glen’s was stomach pains that led to six weeks to live which was really four and a half, every moment of which he was fucking sick and despondent, and couldn’t walk for more than a few minutes, and could barely talk or swallow. When people would see him, they’d whisper about how terrible he looked, like he was already dead.
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The Tower by Veronique Bizot
My friend Saez will have spent no more than an hour of his life in the company of his father-in-law, no more than the time it took to pick him up at the airport and bring him back to the apartment on the 26th floor where Saez lives with his wife, Marie. The moment he set foot in the apartment, Saez’s father-in-law, who until then had never left the mountains of the Armenian Caucasus, walked straight to the bay window, leaned out, ostensibly to take in the view, and vanished.
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Must Believe in Ghost by Jeremy John Parker
I heard about Bob through a notice on the library bulletin board. Normally, it was unremarkable, filled with posters for the community theatre’s production of SPECTACULATHON!—all of Grimm’s fairy-tales compressed into “an unbelievable ninety minutes!”—and the Bread and Soup Dinner (suggested donation $2) on Wednesday at the First Baptist Church of Heartland. A “best of the 50s, 60s, and 70s!” cover band (Skyrock!) was looking for a new drummer.
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Clara Aguilera's Holy Lungs by Molly Olguin
Clara died, as all the others did, at God’s hand. He sent an asteroid hurtling toward the world, and the world sent bombs to shoot it out of the sky, narrowly averting an age of ash and death. But of course God had the last word.
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Danny & Fred by Courtney Harler
In the winter of the blizzards that persisted into March, my father took a contract job three hours away in Ohio. He lived there during the week and only came home on the weekends. A programmer by day and a farmer by night, his daily chores fell to me, a senior in high school. We’d catch up on the major chores every weekend—like hauling hay and repairing the barn—but daily I milked the goats and gathered the eggs and grain-fed our fat, happy quarter horses.
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Swallow by Stephanie A. Vega
Liliana stood between the metal filing cabinet and the cardboard boxes in the dimly lit office, transferring folders as fast as she could, barely scanning the peeling labels as she pulled them out of the drawer in bunches. She recognized one. Instinctively, she leafed through it and landed on a familiar name.
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Birds by Ben Gwin
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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