Fiction

by Joseph Randolph...He looks tired but precise, like an idea that survived its author. Somewhere behind the interstate’s drone, a train sounds — a single, absolute note — and for a moment he thinks of his mother’s voice calling him home, decades gone. The overlap is unbearable.

by Mallory Smart...On Friday, the company schedules this “optional” team building thing called SURVIVING THE GRIND: A SLASHER-BASED APPROACH TO CORPORATE COHESION. HR departments love acting like Buzzfeed on steroids. Pretending structure is a personality trait.

by Elizabeth J. Wenger...Oh, Amelia, the love of my life who did not love me. There is no use asking what she saw in Gregory. Love, like murder, has its own incomprehensible laws.

by L. Soviero...How when he left us, his body cookie-cut the light from the doorway and he laid a ribbon of finger on his lips, his eyes bright with their own celebration.

by Stevie doCarmo...Like poverty unto ridelessness is immaterial since the only thing the big glittering logos on these palaces refer to, end of the day, is sex, which is their thing, their intellectual property, and fuck any rich twats staring from behind all that glass who don’t know it.

by Kathryn Kulpa...Once we shared the backseat. Trusted someone would always be there to drive. The auxiliary parents: your dad, my mom. They were unemployed, sometimes, or their jobs didn’t matter. They had time for our foolishness.

by Connor Harding...What we sell here wears itself drop-waisted, accordion-pleated in rust, gradients of blacklisted thrift rubble. A world of grandma’s unwanteds, cannibalized at the edges by cricket teeth.

by Sarah Kaplan-Cunningham...Normally, disassembling isn’t so dramatic. Tag comes over. We make out, have sex. And sometimes, we remove each other’s limbs and reattach them.

by Jane Wageman...It was August. Everything was meant to be apples and leaves and fresh starts. Everything was meant to be autumn and cool. It was a heat storm with no rain.

by Joshua Jones Lofflin... She sits in profile, the Lady Mary Davis of Saughall, her magnificent horn curling downward like...

by Cate McGowan...It’s not a metaphor. My mother meant it; she said that if she could raise a child to belong equally to land and water, she could unmake the loneliness of the shore.

by Julia Strayer...Mama wanted a house, so she stole one she found abandoned on the corner of Sycamore and Grant that she said would be happier with a family to love it.

by Avra Elliott Wiki Sinaloa I remember a story he wrote about seaglass, followed by the words of Dybek whispered as foreplay. It isn’t easy to fall in love. There has to be strangeness. There has to be a dead ladybug offered as a bridal shower gift. I’ll seal it with modge podge and lace. Make it a bracelet, an adornment covering scars from toy cars thrown in jest. She’s weird like you, a coworker says. The pumpkin vine climbs the apricot tree, and the color of the fruit tha

by Benjamin Drevlow Joe Vasquez When Johnny Cash died I pretended Johnny Cash was my father and my father, like Johnny Cash, was finally dead so I could finally forgive him all the ways that he’d been mean and dismissive to me and how I’d been worthless to him, the youngest of three boys, the mama’s boy, how I didn’t know a crescent wrench from a phillips head, didn’t know patience for boredom, my father finally dead to me because in boredom I had imagination and in my imagin

by Jordyn Damato Олег Мороз 0 I believe in love as much as I believe in any form of God above; below; or to the right of us. I believe in procreation and controlled-population; whatever’s necessary at the time; I understand the importance of marriage; of owning somebody to feel important; of owning somebody else to own anything at all. I understand why homes are built to house couples; to house families; I understand why husband and wife slept in separate beds until the 1950’

by Cole Beauchamp Jan Kopřiva Shauna has had one too many evenings with the cobalt blue de Gournay wallpaper, the glowing chandelier, the polite clink of silverware. She leaps up. Let’s go skinny dipping! And out she charges, into the soft Tennessee night. Voices titter behind her. Good, they’re following. She kicks off her sling backs, sinks her toes into dewy grass as she disrobes. Faux fur stole, purple sequin cocktail dress, thong, Vanity Fair Full Figure Beauty Back Smoo

by Jeff Harvey Delaney Van Momma asks her best friend Edna if she’d help color her hair with a box of dye she got from the discount rack at Fred’s Dollar Store, andwhile the color is setting Momma lights a Winston and says Miss Jasper next door doesn’t have kids since she never hooked a husband and has to work for AT&T all day saying Number Please with nobody to talk to when she gets home, says shelives off TV dinners and drinks fancy wine while watching Dynasty, says every n

by Amy DeBellis Mother’s Embrace by Mikuláš Galanda via Europeana I find her behind the church, tiny in the dirt, curled up like a seashell. I recognize her not with any of my senses but with something banging behind my breastbone, something that screams: That’s her that’s her that’s her! So I scoop her up. I hold her in the palm of my hand, sunk deep into my pocket, all the way home: past the boarded-up storefronts, past the porch where Mrs. Calloway rocks in her dilapidated

by Tom Busillo iuliu illes It was said that you pressed your ear to her cheek. Old men doffed their hats without knowing why. Some remember it as what came after the thunder. Each tooth had its tiny frame. When she smiled, bells rang. When she yawned, wheels spun. When she kissed the air, rubber burned. The town didn’t ask questions. They just learned to look away during mealtimes. Children stopped crying. You could hear a distant street hissing. One spring, a stranger with m

by Sage Tyrtle Isabel Neuffer It’s a quiet time for the children, while the caterpillars are building their chrysalides, attached to the stomach walls. In the towns, in the cities, the children stop their running. Their yelling. They stop asking for food, for another drink of water, they stop asking and their parents lie down on the carpet like children themselves, relieved beyond measure. As the caterpillars busy themselves inside the children’s stomachs, the children like t