Fiction

by MB Valente...At recess that first day she told me to punch a boy she pointed out and I did. He hit me back and got in trouble but nobody yelled at me. I just crouched in her shadow and felt its warmth fall over me like a wing.

by Michael Czyzniejewski...I felt compelled to sit, peck at the keys, so many of them missing, yet just enough, the exact keys that I needed still there: Despite me never playing before, not a note, I played a song, my fingers gliding, the music flowing.

by Natalie Paris...For a long while, no one would notice her car in the ocean of cars, stretching out towards the horizon—north, south, east, and west—and that was just the way that Marcie would have wanted it. Her car could be anyone’s. No one would bother her.

by Jack Fisher...everyone within smelling distance would remember what had floated past them. Chickens. Mattresses. Gas cans. Family photos. A horse with one eye open. A young woman's wedding dress, moving in the current as though the bride were still inside it.

by Tymber Wolf...No one here drinks water. They only bathe in it on Sundays. They aren’t a dirty bunch, just don’t want to pay the price of water in the desert. They have an unspoken culture to use what they are willing to have.

by Casey Jo Graham Welmers...I wasn’t convinced of its death. For three days I just left it in the tank, fins dropping across the water like a gossamer veil. Then I scooped it out with my bare hand and buried it as deep as I possibly could in our immaculate lawn.

by Elissa Field...I eye one under glass in diesel green, iridescent like rainbows on petrol. Laser embossed handgrips in swirls of vining flowers. I’d fired yours at the range. First time I heard a shot that close, I cried.

by Thad DeVassie...They say it comes with electrolytes. Even the chosen typeface for the word electrolytes! looks exciting and exuberant, and the sound of it rolling off the tongue conjures up images of tiny prizes floating in the fluid.

by Sarp Sozdinler...First: remove all the mirrors in your home. Hide them in the crawl space, bury them in your landlord’s garden, shove them in the backseat of a stranger’s car.

by Emily Rinkema...The Mongols don’t notice me right away. I’m wearing sweatpants, wool socks, and a Dogs are My People hoodie, which I haven’t taken off since I checked in two days ago, alone.

by Pravin Vemuri...Unsurprisingly, also unwittingly, he turned to atheism by seven. To existentialism by sixteen. To hard drugs soon after.

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.