Get out of the house, they said. Do something. Make something. Be something. They knew, they understood. But it was time, they said. We’re just trying to help, just looking out for you, just trying to help you move on, carry on, get through it, over it, past it.
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Boyfriend Material by Garrett Ashley
As if to interrupt the growing rift in mine and Don's own relationship, the swearing and physical brawls, broken lamps and TV remotes, Don's cousin made the leap to split with her boyfriend, and so she asked for a little help getting back onto her feet.
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Anniversary by Simona Zaretsky
I want to have no synonym. No confusion with the other lost children, who cry quietly because they haven’t been young since grief froze fingers and toes, took hearts and squeezed them of decadent innocence, dripping away like rose-colored honey.
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Until It Hits Something Solid by Daniel Mazzacane
Wilder met Corey four months after moving to Oakhurst when Wilder managed to get a spot on the logging crew mid-season.
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Rishtein (Relationships and/or Proposals) by Nimra Azmi
Of the one hundred kilograms of loneliness in her body, these interactions managed to keep perhaps half a kilo at bay.
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Plastic Has Consequences by Kim Wyatt
I’ve come to realize the reason I am not making connection with anyone is a sign from the universe. I need to go within, to figure things out on my own.
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The Unraveling by Natalie Teal McAllister
The beginnings of new threads emerge. This time she puts her palms against the threads, pushes them back into place on his skin, holds them as one might hold together something glued.
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A Murder of Crows: The Kanye West Conversion
Anyhow, Maura chooses ballet for her son because she’s never seen a coon pirouette a la seconde, never seen an Uncle Tom execute consecutive tour jetes. Ballet is safe (thugs don’t twirl), albeit a little effeminate and her husband Marvin would have a fit if he knew.
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Glades People by Roxane Gay
Tricia loved to talk with her clients. That’s how she judged people.
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Warnings by Rebecca Turkewitz
We heeded most of the warnings most of the time. But we were runners. And no one told the boys’ team to practice in pairs or avoid wearing headphones at night. Besides, when we ran, who could touch us? We were our own private rooms.
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Moles by Kellie Rankey
The behavior seems instinctual; children first meet their mothers, and then they meet the dirt, and the latter may pull them from the former. There is a connection to dirt and digging and digging and the life to be found in layers. All sorts of reasons to love it, they tell us.
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Belly Heat by Eleanor Howell
This was not what she wanted to do with her day. She had meant to spend the afternoon writing a pitch; now she had scramble to protect her body from a mess that she, even in her drunken state, had attempted to prevent.
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Looking by Emma Brousseau
But the man was jealous of even a peek. He took up my entire sightline that day, hanging half his body out of my eye or running between them to try to block every moment alone, every moment trying to see myself.
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Mother, May I? by Melissa Lore
Mother, did I make you proud?
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Do You Eat Monkey Brains? by Arvin Ramgoolam
What did the future have in store for me when my only cultural touchstones were Apu from The Simpsons, the evil Mola Ram, and the village of starved, tattered clothed Indians offering the hero their last bits of rice?
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Chicory by Pascha Sotolongo
My father can be very beguiling. I don’t want to get too drawn into his bizarre world. I feel weird enough as it is, without the chicory: Cuban in a town with no other Cubans, gangly, smart, hairy, socially awkward, and I’m never bored.
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Make a Wish by Jean Synodinos
Words carved with an urgent affection that seems everlasting but always fades when stripped and sanded to dust by a nameless janitor over summer vacation. Words like these: Julie, I wish this was enough. All the love I’ve left in this world is yours.
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Hairy Govinda by Kathy Anderson
This old yoga lady next to me throws her legs up in the air and farts. That’s okay by me.
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The Funeral by Billy Hallal
I’d never been alone with a girl in the house (or anywhere, really)—I was pretty sure it was against some parental rule. But so was getting drunk at a wake. And besides, Celeste was my cousin. No cause for suspicion there.
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Some Theories of Time Travel by Malka Gould
I’m not sure when I lost the barriers I had so carefully cultivated, when I found myself like some kind of throbbing nerve in city after city. Kissing strangers and looking for friends, and answers, and places to sleep.
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