Kelsey Flaherty
Something Believable
Jenna James lost her father last week. I saw it on TikTok.
She sits cross-legged on her bedroom floor while soft piano music plays underneath her grief. Her mascara is smudged beneath both eyes. She says she feels hollow now. Different. Like part of her has been removed…
Heather Emmanuel
Course Correction
Your wedding band is tucked into the front pocket of your jeans.
Your soon-to-be ex-wife doesn’t ask where you’re going. No comment about the bergamot perfume on your wrists. No note of the straightened hair tucked behind pierced ears.
The front door shuts behind you with a measured thud.
You don’t know when leaving became easy…
Adam Berlin
where we grew up it was happening all around
The Emerald Inn is empty. The waiters are sitting at a table in back, and an old man is sitting with his pint at the bar, and two stools down a woman’s eating dinner and that’s it. I sit at the corner stool and order a Wild Turkey. The bartender looks like he was picked on as a kid, like he’s mid-flinch. There are TV’s all around…
Mary Magdalen Smihula
Odyssey Drive
…Some days after work, blurry-eyed, she hesitated at the wrong driveway. Low-pitched roofs, stucco walls with stone accents. Beige, and exactly the same. It was a welcome change from her last place. Her only complaint was the staked trees lining the street, small, unsightly, tied up like voodoo dolls…
Catherine O’Brien
Tumble
…He doesn’t show emotion. His identification photo looks like self-portraiture. I briefly entertain the idea of jumping out and hailing a different taxi but rain has christened itself jewel of the season so I sow my bum to the seat. I soon learn silence is unimpeachable for him. What I don’t know is that he has six kids and a recliner he sits in when home that they climb like newly fallen snow. He’s tolerant of them but especially child number six who unwittingly helped to heal his wife’s broken heart…
Abigail Chien
Everything Everywhere All at Once
…On the page for February 28, 2026, there is a still from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, where the protagonist, Evelyn, has a third eye on her forehead. That third eye has been staring at the ceiling in my empty room ever since, because the calendar wouldn’t fit in my suitcase and had to be left behind. I like to think the third eye is watching over my room…
Amrita Chowdhury
Five in a Suitcase
…There is no box to fill on the customs form for a father’s name. Gifts, yes. Commercial samples, food, plant matter, currency above ten thousand dollars. There is nowhere to declare the man whose bed I am standing over, packing into a suitcase one object at a time. He would not cross the ocean to visit me and my wife. Because it was me and my wife and not me and my husband. I understood he would not cross the ocean for me…
Eric Roller
Snake Catcher
My mother collected rattlesnakes. On rare occasions she found coral snakes and, once, a Gila monster. It welled up from the desert like it had something to say. She listened.
She was a campground host in Tucson Mountain Park, two miles from Old Tucson Studios. Tourists came from all over the world to photograph saguaros and watch fake cowboys shoot blanks at each other in the red sunsets. But snakes made the desert too real…
Andrew Bertaina
The Writing of His Novel
A lot of people told him he couldn’t write his novel the way he was trying to. They offered him tips, suggestions, book recommendations, little writing routines that had worked in the writing of their novels. He was to wake early, to set timers, to read inspirational books, provide a long and detailed outline that he should tape to his study walls. Though he understood these people meant well, he didn’t understand what they expected him to get from their descriptions of writing novels. He wasn’t trying to write their novel…
Christie Chapman
Orbital Resonance
…You danced into me at the goth club. You apologized as if it weren’t fate. I thought: “Maybe this time?” At a party I painted a tree onto your body, my brush navigating the contours of your bikini: a sturdy oak with sky-reaching branches. You say: “I’ve never been metaphysical. I don’t believe in past lives.” I mailed you a ring, a simple gold circle, when I heard you’d said yes to him. I was giving you a chance, though I knew better. What is left for me to do?…
Zary Fekete
Base-Isolated Life
The app on our phones uses a sound that doesn’t exist in nature. It is a digital chime, too bright for the middle of the night. Since we moved to Tokyo last summer, we hear it at least once a week. Usually, the notification tells us about a tremor four hundred kilometers away, off the coast of Fukushima or deep beneath the mountains of Ibaraki. We look at the glowing screen, turn back to whatever we were doing.
But the first large one came in November, around three in the morning…
Richard Leise and Lillian Taylor
Off in the Marigolds
Telly could not say when the rabbit first entered the garden. The animal arrived with the wet heat of July. Small. Brown. Still among the marigolds.
The yard did not appear disturbed. Water gathered in thin puddles along uneven ground, gnats swirling just above the damp earth. Tomatoes sagged against their stakes along the fence…