Time plus love equals ordinary disappointments, which as it turns out, has been enough to harm the good feelings and brain reactions Jon and I used to have for one another.
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Leatherface by Carol Claassen
“In the past two years she’s known him, he’s told her almost everything about the movie. No surprises. She knows how it ends.”
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Home by David L. Ulin
“Still, what else does New York provoke but memory — for me, anyway, who hasn’t lived here for more years than my children have been alive?”
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The Last Missouri Aspens by Annie Sand
I glanced at the photograph: a teardrop shape, the size of my palm, its edges toothed with soft points curving up from stem to tip, a yellow aspen leaf. Bigtooth aspens are common in Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but not in Missouri, where differences in climate and soil hem their natural range. I’d been told that somewhere in Adair County, in a nature preserve called Big Creek, was the last stand of bigtooth aspen known to exist in the state. When I’d found out, I’d immediately called my mother.
“I’ve got your trees,” I told her.
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Writing Instructions for Non-Native Speakers by Robert Anthony Siegel
We are placed in a guest house on campus, a sort of rotting cottage out of a folk tale, hidden in a world of its own behind a ten-foot wall of bamboo and flowering bushes. I sprawl on the bed, staring at the water stains on the ceiling, sweating. I’ve never experienced jet lag this intense.
Read MoreWe, Little Griefs by Brit Barnhouse
Who knew sand could inspire We
baked in the sun I climbed into caves
On Choosing Ignorance by Kara Vernor
Growing up in a liberal, college town, I frequented the art house theater where I stood in the ticket line alongside college students with labret piercings and grey-haired white couples and what I assumed to be serious environmentalists in thin-rimmed glasses and fleece outerwear.
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Rainbow Sugar by Erin Langner
I’m worried we’re too late. Mustangs and Astro vans and stretch SUVs brim over the Peppermill’s parking lot because there’s no such thing as an unbeaten path. It’s already hot enough to feel the asphalt cooking the soles of my cheap-leather, criss-cross sandals as we walk through the double glass doors. But this is our last-chance-weekend escape, our meet-up between the coasts, on the Las Vegas Strip.
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Discovery Kid: Longing for Pig Hearts, Stories, and the “Right” Kind of Knowledge, by Sarah Hoenicke
My siblings stand “at attention,” and salute me before I dole out their chores on individual, handwritten lists. We each have an alias printed on laminated name tags. We go on bike rides. I instruct them to form a line behind me, oldest to youngest, and then circle around to ride behind my littlest sister. And there we are: a wobbly snake; our helmets five points of backbone. It is in this way that our childhood sits in my memory. Rarely am I an “I” so much as a “we.”
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Balling by Jerald Walker
A private college in Boston was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Along with being criticized for its lack of racial diversity, one of its black faculty had filed a discrimination lawsuit, and another had complained to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. A third had quit. It was rumored that the president, under whose watch these troubles festered, was being forced to resign. And so when I saw their ad for a professor of creative writing, with a specific appeal for applicants of color, I could not believe my good fortune. The college, it seemed to me, like a flowering boll of cotton beneath the hot Georgia sun, was ripe for the picking.
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Unpredictable by Patrick Madden
Each sentence seems its own aphorism, a particle afloat humming in harmony with the others.
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Farewell, Cassini, How Far You've Come by Gabriela Denise Frank
Cassini’s impending doom stirred an inexplicable sadness in me. As the broadcast went on, I felt the bitter irony of human gains: here, we create a technological marvel who faithfully increases our knowledge—for two decades, Cassini has delivered images and data of thrilling celestial phenomena to our fingertips—and, in return, we send it on a suicide mission.
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Smallmouth by Justin Hocking
So many things fell into place after that dental exam. The twenty-seven previous years of painful shyness. My trouble pushing words through this tiny oral aperture. Everyone always asking me to speak up. The dentist helped me understand that my social anxiety has a physical component, right here on my face.
Read MoreCurses by Berry Grass
TNS stands in solidarity with the trans community. As a show of support, we are proud to reprint and celebrate the work of Berry Grass.
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Learning How to be Female by Annie Lampman
As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I was convinced that glossy “magazine women” were a distinct subspecies of human females who came out of the womb painted like colorful aliens, born complete with purple eyelids, black-lined eyes and thick-coated lashes, bright pink cheeks, and shiny-plump red lips. I studied them for hours, fascinated by their colorful flawlessness compared to the plain imperfection of “normal women.”
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Edge of a Piece of Cloth, Made Strong by Holly Willis
If I could I would sew for my sister a coat of soft leather. I would ply malleable pink hide for an effort so vital, but a gabardine twill is perhaps more practical. Gleaned from the coats of animals, culled from the cocoons of silkworms, scavenged from the seeds and leaves and stems of plants, remnants, vestiges, reckoning, reckoning.
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On Becoming a Person of Color by Anne Liu Kellor
She is used to defining herself in the negative—not quite this or that; or as divided—only half or part. She is mixed, which means that she has never seen herself entirely as Chinese, nor entirely as white. As a teenager, her friends were mostly white, in a school that was mostly black and white, so she identified with the white kids. Her friends would eagerly ingest her mom’s Chinese leftovers after a night of partying (where she’d teach them how to say, We are going to drink a lot of beer tonight! in Mandarin); she was their fun Asian friend, different, yet rooted in the same pop culture, white culture.
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Neighbor by Virginia Marshall
Virginia Marshall is a writer and audio producer. Her work has been published in The Harvard Review, Brevity, Atlas Obscura, and has aired on NPR and WBUR.
No One Here Named Me by Suzanne Roberts
At Burning Man, you’re supposed to resolve your issues with a Black Rock Ranger, someone who can come and negotiate problems on the playa, but I was beyond that. I wanted to call someone with handcuffs and a squad car, someone who could take him away. But would they? I didn’t know.
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Nurse Dog by Sarah Kasbeer
You feel like you’re wearing your body as a suit and suddenly you want to unzip it and leave it by the bedside. You feel smothered by something you can only identify as yourself.
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