We didn’t have friends on board. We didn’t have friends of friends on board. And we hadn’t ever even been to Miami, or to Brazil. So we went about our day. We made coffee.
Read MoreJack in Search of a Mother by Alison Kinney
Jack looked at his own two feet dangling over the giant's shoulder. He thought about how small he was next to the giant, beside the sea.
Read MoreShadow Work by Soramimi Hanarejima
After work, we meet in the park near your office to swap shadows.
Read MoreEarly Days by Carol M. Quinn
Lisa will not sit down, will not shut her eyes any longer than it takes to blink, because when she does, she has learned, her muscles begin to release and the room lilts gently from one side to the other and she cannot trust her arms to keep hold of her baby.
Read MoreTake a Ride in My Jag by Catherine Cort
Jags can be time-consuming. And then there is the problem of satisfying its animalistic nature. Especially since tonight is Friday night, and you are going out.
Read MoreA Come to Jesus Moment in the Gynecologist’s Office by Frederica Morgan Davis
Did so many women come in with babies growing inside them that Jesus acknowledged that plural? Or was it just a nice Southern thing? Like the French “vous,” used in singular formal to show respect to elders?
Read MoreDiana's Chin by Taylor Arnette
You’d paid the fourteen dollars (plus tax and service fees), sure that it was going to be in the main theater with the red fabric seats and gold façades on the ceiling. It made you feel classic. Instead, you sat in what could have been someone’s at-home projector room with ten other people, all waiting to watch a biopic about Princess Diana.
Read MoreFriends Forever by Mairéad Kiernan
The point is, I could die at any moment with two living parents who would choose some tacky, pink, heart-shaped granite headstone for my grave and write Beloved Daughter on it with the emblem of a cross or some other religious symbol above my name, and that is not happening.
Read MoreWhat We Did to Hansen by David DeGusta
We started spending less time at the park, arriving home while sunlight was still on offer and confusing our parents. We paid more attention to who showed up in the park and who didn’t. Absences now felt like defections, lessening our numbers and making us vulnerable in a way that tightened our stomachs when we thought about Hansen.
Read MoreDe Domum by Melanie Conroy-Goldman
I know my house is a woman because she has a migrating trap door. I’m in the hallway. Whoops! I’m in the kitchen. I’m in the basement. Whoops! I’m in the attic. I can see the door’s outline if I pay attention and it’s possible to tiptoe very carefully around its edges, but it is easy to get distracted in the house.
Read MoreA Cement Mother by Elizabeth Brus
On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets.
Read MoreYou Think Mom Would Like It? by Steve Chang
We both know how our mom feels about us bringing things home, things we find. Strange things, she calls them. Once, I showed her this quarter I’d picked up at school. I found it in the lunchroom. I said, Look! And, gasping hard, she slapped it from my hand.
Read MoreMissing by Rick Andrews
You are still learning the subways and have to ask someone which way is south once you exit the train at Lafayette; the dot on your phone is being difficult.
Read MoreLoss Leader by Stacey Resnikoff
I have no discernable personality. Is that harsh? I don’t think so. My prescription makes me incapable of harsh, even to myself. I’ve been worn down smooth, plus a shave extra—less steadying than reversal.
Read MoreGeothermal by Denise S. Robbins
We came to learn how to heat up the earth to cool down the sky. On the first hot day of a scorching summer, we drove in two vans, eight PhD candidates and two professors from the University of Illinois, two hours south of campus to the enhanced geothermal testing system at the research institute outside Flat Rock, Illinois.
Read MoreSowing Ground by Elliot Alpern
Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
Read MoreSoulcraft by Larry Flynn
She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead.
Read MoreFather Francisco Makes a Friend by Charles Haddox
Amid the maize and sugarcane fields, the village looked like a collection of cupboards painted white and left out to dry in the wind. Barking echoed over cactus and discarded glass bottles. Sunday mornings in San Juan Camotlán were usually quiet as a broken-down motorbike.
Read MoreBackwards T-Shirt by Genevieve Abravanel
It was like the old days—the earliest days—those chatrooms where lines of text concealed everything except your wit or the way it unraveled but they had already unraveled, now that everyone was home-bound except those who didn’t and got caught by the authorities and everyone wanted that job.
Read MoreGus Who Sells Body Parts Down By The Railroad Tracks By Marya Brennan
When we first started dating, we’d stay up past sunrise doing nothing but blah blah blah, but then the Sad Thing crept in, and my husband refused to speak. The silence in our house is making my ears shrink, I swear. I stick a cue tip in and each day it swirls a little smaller. One day it won’t fit at all.
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