Featured Fiction Writer
Sarah Stone
Hiding Places
At dinner, my friend says that her favorite game as a child was running away and hiding. She would get the other children to find a place they could be safe. We’d been talking about how old we were when we first learned our family histories. Her family, considering the neighbors, asked, who would hide us…
Patricia Quintana Bidar
To the Small Suitcase Forgotten for Years, Containing Little Paul’s Hawaii Things
It was their toughest year to date, when Eve’s husband attempted his first and only antidepressant. When Eve’s job required her to fly to the east coast for a conference and then a two-day client meeting. When the preschool called twice about their son in the same week: Little Paul, just three, had invented a game called Catch ’em and Kiss ’em and another called Alcoholic Dolphins…
Chris Cottom
A Concise History of Evening Class
Car Maintenance
The others nod knowingly over the instructor’s crud-free carburettors. You want to learn how to use a pair of tights as an emergency fanbelt, although first you’ll need a car. And a girlfriend.
Jive
The Oxford Rock ’n’ Roll Society meets off Cornmarket and you Rock Around The Clock with Rosemary; but only until nine-thirty because she has a boyfriend, a third-year physicist. She waves from his 1966 2CV as you wait for your bus on the Botley Road in the rain….
Laury A. Egan
Simon Says
Mommy disappeared at Easter. Simon Senior—my granddad—told me the Easter Bunny nipped off with her. Said the Bunny needed someone to paint eggs bright colors. Mommy liked to do this so I figured it was her new job. Then Simon Junior—my daddy—explained she was hired to sew flags for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. He didn’t say where. It’s now August 1…
L Mari Harris
All of This Is Temporary
…For months now, the husband has been trying to tell the wife about his dreams. Paper skies, torn at the edges. Dead trees, leafless, brittle, the bark peeling in strips. A house surrounded by overgrown weeds, curtains billowing through broken glass panes. A swing dangling and twisting from one chain. I don’t understand what they mean, they must mean something. The husband hangs his head, morning light spreading across the floor, dividing the room…
Alexis MacIsaac
Cleaner
Tuesday is the day I most look forward to. I watch for her from my front window. She’s usually on time, but occasionally she’s early, depending on the bus she takes; yet her picture is always the same, a youngish woman rounding the corner with her head down and her shoulders slightly slumped, heavy from her canvas bag full of bottles of bleach and orange oil and rags and sponges, with a mop clenched in the hot crevice of her left armpit…
Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch
Disembodied
Gait Training
Vicky pours her body into the ballet slippers standing en pointe. Red ribbons tie themselves around her ankles.
Pirouetting, leaping, sashaying, I followed you to a southern shore where the light shone brighter than any spotlight. But no one can understand why. No one can fill my shoes…
Laura Leigh Morris
Mama Bear
“Hold my hand,” Joan says, though she knows he won’t. He never does. She grabs Micah’s forearm before he can dart in front of a car. He tries to wriggle loose, but she grips him tight until they’re across the drive-thru lane.
Inside, he slips from her grasp and runs to the play area, a castle with a ball pit for a moat. It has tunnels and ladders and a turret at the very top, every bit of it covered in snot and spit. Joan doesn’t care…
Catherine Roberts
Something Cold in the Grass
The hoop’s high, but Heaven’s higher, my old basketball coach would say, meaning, I think, that it’s harder to rest in peace than it is to keep living. Or something. I don’t know. I’m not religious; pretty sure it’s just rocks up there, and I heard that guy practices medicine now, so—
Here I am, living, when I find a python in my garden at night. Albino scales zag, its tongue slashes air. Nothing between me and it but sliding glass…
Liz Ross
Comfort Zone
Henry moved across campus like a politician through a crowd. Tall, almost Lincolnesque, crying Hello! and offering fist bumps to anyone who made eye contact.
“Who’s that?” I asked the roommate I’d only just met, a girl with a hoop through her lower lip whose name tag said STACY – MINNEAPOLIS – BIOLOGY.
We were loitering near the condiments at a mixer for first-year students, both of us balancing hot dogs on thin paper plates.
“That’s Henry,” Stacy said…
Beth Sherman
Photo: Darya Tryfanava on Unsplash
My father is obsessed with the Flamingo Cam at Zoo Miami
He says there are 33 flamingos. I say 32. It’s hard to count because they keep wandering in and out of camera range.
They wade in the lagoon. Sidle into the water like grandparents tiptoeing into the shallow end of the pool. Sleep on one leg with their heads tucked into plumage. Drag their beaks across the sand in search of bugs. The color of mangos, fire, yams, Barbie pink lawn ornaments.
“They can fly you know,” my father says, as the nurse adjusts his IV line. “In the wild. In real life.”
Emily Behnke
there once was a child who left in the night
After that, you bundled me in those ratty handsewn quilts that kept you sane while you were pregnant. Other mothers poked at their fleshy sacks of children. They measured the length of their teeth. You covered me up and told everyone I’d gotten a chill, gave me a woolen hood to shadow my face…
Sacha Bissonnette
They want to know about the dead girl
They wanted to know if you died quickly. I answered that you did. But I don’t know. The man in grey said your neck broke the fall. And the other way around.
They asked who was out looking for you. Your mother had called. She had just finished making your favorite. She wondered where you were…
Steve Dawson
Vermincarnation
The cornstalk maze, a rusty Ferris wheel, and deep-fried chunks of cheese. Here I was again at the annual county fair. The kids ditched me immediately to find their friends. Not much here for an old guy like me to do and pass the time. I could shoot some tin ducks and win a stuffed animal, but then I’d have to carry the thing around for the rest of the day.
That’s why beer gardens are my sanctuary…
Read More
Cecilia Durbin
Earthbound
“Since finishing a glass of icy lemon water after an accidental nap, one whereupon I woke and was unsure if seven o’clock was ante or post meridiem, I have been craving the sensation of lying face-down on a dusty gravel road to get closer to the ground. I want to feel the weight of the chalk clinging to my eyelid oil…
Read More
Amalia Gladhart
Cicatriz – Scab – Costra – Scar
Ruth had been looking to branch out, not teach Spanish forever. So she completed training, passed the interpreter’s exam, signed up for practice hours at the free clinic. Today was her first solo shift. Her instructor had said interpret everything, that was the ethical imperative. But when the surgeon, washing his hands, regaled the nurse with grisly YouTube videos he’d watched (tracheotomy, hip replacement)—what was the point?…
Baylee Less-Eiseman
Commuting: A Concept Album
Track 1: Citizenship
Track 1 is chosen most often on Monday mornings, after a restorative weekend at home. You’ve likely meal-prepped for the week ahead and woke up at 5:30am for the Ashtanga yoga class at a local studio. You feel glowy and confident that you’ve done enough self-care to engage with a little social justice. You are assessing your rights to global citizenship after reading the Washington Post article about the war in Ukraine…
Anthony Martin
Boy You Wonder
if he was an angel but the ten to the Full Moon isn’t exactly the stuff of revelation. Even coming from Azure House, where let’s just say the blottos love to circle up and talk god. But on an empty bus headed to my evening shift he announced: Chadwick, here only for a time. Like cicadas. Just us there, gray sleety hellswirl outside, me in slip-resistant clogs, nauseated from God knows what…
Carolyn Mikulencak
The Terrible Bed
The first cat arrived unforeseen and unhoped for on the windowsill of the house in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and was spotted in the predawn by the mother, who had just started the coffeepot, which gurgled on the counter. This was the era of blue house robe. This was the time of tiny television, also on the counter, which, with black knob, turned on in a small circle that grew to fill the screen in the way a vision might come into focus…
Catherine O’Brien
Untimed
It is the twenty-third part of the day. We have been here for a full hour.
“Any time you like”, that’s what some part of you has the gall to say. Your face is naturally compact and pensive.
In the spur of the moment, I lean across and pinch you to give a bad welcome to your horrible attitude…
Eleanor Porter
Her story
It was in the air when she woke; the dog was delighted to see her of course, but the windows dribbled condensation. The kitchen was too thick with silence for breakfast. Her apple blinked. She swallowed, opened the lid. So. She hadn’t thought that it would come so soon. He began with compliments. She scanned for the ‘but.’ There were two of them…
Read More
Rebecca Tiger
There Is No Ordinary
Dream. My mother is covered in dust, clawing her way to the surface, she’s still alive and struggles to find her way out. She emerges, clumps of dirt hanging off her silver hair, still in the flimsy piss-covered nightgown she wore when she was living with my father. Several nights a week, she appears to me like this. My therapist tells me that I am dreaming about myself…
Read More