When you were a teenager, you volunteered for an organization in the town where you grew up, a town so small most people called it by the name of the city beside it. The organization raised money for people living with HIV and AIDS. You’ve forgotten the name of the organization, but not the names of the people you met there. Michael. Terry. Anthony. Angel. Always men, even when their names were fluid.
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Clementine, My Darling (an almost-memoir) by Joanna Brichetto
It was the clementine that killed me. I peeled it for your lunchbox because you need Fruit to complement the Protein and the Crunchy, and because school lunch is so short and you get busy chatting and if I don't peel it for you and break it into segments, the whole thing comes back home in its BPA-free, nesting container (labeled with your name in silver Sharpie).
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What'll I Do by M. A. Vizsolyi
She thought she heard someone say her name—not loudly, but not loud enough that she could make out the melody of vowel sounds that comprised her name—Laura, it said—in a way that asked her to look quickly, as if there were something to see suddenly alighting just behind her on the shelf of the bookcase—but she didn’t see anything—and things like this happened to her once and a while, but not so much that she thought it odd.
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Screen Time by Mina Manchester
Light crept in through the space between the black out curtains hanging over the bedroom window. Ron, her husband, shifted in his sleep. His shoulder twitched slightly as if reacting to a breeze. Soon the alarm would go off and he would stretch and get out of bed, not bounding exactly, but with enough gusto that Leigh would feel guilty. She was always tired. So, so tired, ever since their son was born.
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Oracle by Dustin Heron
Now Zeke looks at his grandfather. A thin old man always stooped over, the ridges of his spine bulging against his flannel, baggy corduroys hanging from his bony hips. He’s standing in the shadows of the porch, dusty shadows crammed with old wooden chairs split at the seat and mildewed couches sagging under milk crates stuffed with odds and ends. All this leading into a narrow house just as dark and just as choked with dust, the whole house tottering into its last stage of disrepair. Zeke wants to scream at everything and he wants to smash it all.
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Punch Line By Jason Manganaro
One Wednesday, a man sat on a bench under a bus shelter, sipping a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. The coffee was too hot, making each sip unbearable, but he kept at it. Car after car whizzed past, upsetting the brisk morning air with a sharp swoosh that the man found oddly soothing. Like waves from a derelict sea, chopping at the shore.
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Northern Straits by Anne Trooper
The carpenters and fishermen come into Ralph’s for breakfast. They used to eye me up and down, but with a baby growing in my belly, I guess I’m not good for that anymore. I have on the brown, canvas, second-hand coat I found at the Trading Post. A man’s coat, but it fits pretty well, and I can’t see me in cute dresses with bows on the front, or tops that say baby on board.
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The Bubble Wrapped Heart By Geoffrey Line
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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