Fiction

by Max Schmidt Wheeler David Clode I carry my father in a glass vial around my neck. I take a sniff of him, like smelling salts, to settle my nerves or return to my abandoned body. It is a sharp, briny smell — he is a seahorse flecked with green and gold. He flexes his curved tail, and I pop off the cork to drop in a flake of treat. His voice is so quiet now that I have to lean close to hear him: You’re gaining weight. But then you’ve always been a big girl. Alas, he is my ta

by Adam Straus Spenser Sembrat We’re The Three Justins and we live together. It’s like we’re back on deployment; the apartment’s walls are covered in mud we got shipped over from Afghanistan. Inside we stand post, clean weapons, and rest at staggered intervals so someone’s always awake. Red lens-only after nightfall, stand-to at dawn and dusk. No patrols, though. Not enough manpower. Instead we take target practice at photos of ourselves pinned up against the walls. The thick

by Jonathan Cardew Detail from St. Hilda at Hartlepool by James Clark (artist) (oil painting)/CC Hartlepool Art Gallery we snorted charlie in the co-op car park, forgot about our woes and stds, even jimmy’s crabs were crawling less now, he was a happy chappy with very little clappy in the trappy, god it was hot, like lick the sweat off your balls hot, 51c in the north, melting tarmac, melting politicians, melting asses, like actual donkeys melting from the inside out, on the

by Maura Yzmore Luke Pennystan Jesus sat in the booth opposite mine at Denny’s, slowly pouring syrup over a tower of pancakes topped with butter. When he was done, he rotated the plate clockwise, then counterclockwise, only small angles each way, until the orientation was just perfect, with a brief nod completing the ritual. Then he cut out a wedge, tall and slim, and smiled at the skewered syrupy stack like it was the most delightful thing he’d ever seen. By the time he fina

by Neidy McHugh Juskteez Vu After I explain, the doctor says I am not in the hospital for swallowing some coins. A coin, he explains, will pass on its own. There is the rare occurrence of a blockage, but that is not my diagnosis. My symptoms are as follows: abdominal pain, hair loss, disorientation, mild bleeding from the eyes, and auditory and visual hallucinations. Too severe a reaction, he is certain, to be attributed to a few swallowed pennies. Later, the doctor is startl

by George Nevgodovskyy Well Studio/Unsplash A child fell from that building. I hear you say this after we’d been living in its shadow for years, looming outside our window. Decades old sun-faded concrete, five ’o clock shadow of mold. Big balconies jutting out — these bulging excrescences. Old construction. They don’t make balconies that big anymore. Where’d you hear that? Read about it a few years back. I remember the photograph. It was newer back then. Obviously. I’d always

by Nico M. David von Diemar Mamá had texted Mijo around 2am. He doesn’t read the message until he’s taking his phone out for the bouncer, a walrus of a man in figure, temperament, and mustache. Not Mijo’s type. No me ignores, Mijo, she’d texted. It’s only 5pm her time in Lincoln Heights. And Mijo isn’t ignoring her, he’s setting a boundary. He’ll talk to her when he’s ready, okay? ¿No puede entender eso? Mamá never set no damn boundary with her own mother. Does Mijo want to w

by Meg Tuite Artur Aldyrkhanov It is dark and the branches bent and pointing at me take on a sinister sneer as if to say what is it that you do? I am wind-stooped and bear the ridicule of their whispering fingers. I walk with a look that the feet can’t say, following themselves because it is all that they know. I am sure you are under the same grayed vapors of another city. Remember me when you stare into the fever of faces; that one of them is looking for you…thinks of you…m

by Rebecca Kilroy I Yunmai/Unsplash Our mothers’ diets were our third parents, hovering around the kitchen since we were kids. They packed us sandwiches on whole-wheat bread and 100 calorie snack-bags in our lunchboxes. They hung weight loss posters on the fridge next to our fingerpaint drawings. We saw them as soon as we learned to read. Our mother’s diets watched us. They poked out at us from mirrors. They gathered in the soft, helpless places — breasts and hips and thighs.

by Addison Zeller Maarten Zuidhoorn I don’t remember how to spell her Norwegian name, but it means Mouse-Mouth, and I picture her as a low raincloud pushing through ferns, electric within. A gray cat, bony, black stripes down her back and tail. Obviously old from the way she moved — as if a leg hadn’t set — and her leaden fur that looked rained on. She came down the side of the fjord a couple months before I visited Dad in Norway. Perhaps she’d guarded an apple or cherry orch

by Tyler Anne Whichard Mackenzie Cruz Momma, there’s grief like a beach breeze in October: a numbness that turns near-comfort because at least it’s relief from the cold. Your skin just — forgets that it used to be skin. I sit with a girl named Hazel in the hold of such an evening, swaying in time with the waves at our toes. The sun left us but we linger, losing feeling in our ears, our fingers, our mouths. I want to kiss her. I want to wash the sand from her skin and wrap her

by Brett Biebel Chris Ensminger Saint Barb’s has a raccoon problem, and they’re trying to manage it with a bunch of coyote urine they buy off-book and in bulk from this guy Chad down at the Farm and Fleet because the thing about raccoon shit is it’s toxic. Students collect it. It has a way of showing up in certain high-level administrative offices on campus, and a few of the administrators are let’s just say a wee bit neurotic about various kinds of contaminants and hence the

by Frances Gapper Chris Charles A Skeleton Triptych 1. A skeleton who doesn’t have a partner lies down on the beach next to a jellyfish and whistles an empty-chested sigh. “Food became hard to digest, so I stopped eating.” “Lucky me, I have only one orifice,” says the jellyfish. “Stuff in, waste out.” But its polite pipe is drowned by the skeleton’s clatter-chatter: “My idol, whose name I don’t recall. Her grave is awkwardly situated, on a hill. She’s taking her time decaying

by Sean Ennis Inga Gezalian These wrens were building a nest above where our cat sleeps at night. To call someone a bird brain is a real insult. So, I placed a small mirror in the nest to give them the shock and fear of self-recognition, aka eisoptrophobia. Some people have ideas about me that are completely wrong. I love that. I don’t care that much about money. I like helping people, and I can be good at it. Yes, one of the methods is to present people with a mirror. This i

by Sumitra Singam Stephanie Gibeault Sweat pours, cracking through the layer of dust on my face, like rain flooding desiccated riverbeds. I can’t have a bath. My mother-in-law hasn’t heated the water yet. She refuses to let me have a cold one, though my body pulls towards the hose like it is a magnet. “Any fool knows that will turn the baby into a girl,” she says, talking out of the corner of her mouth. “Wait until the sun goes down, then you can have bath hot-hot.” Her paan

by Beth Hahn Weirdly, you become an egg. No shell. Hard boiled. A woman takes you out of the refrigerator and carries you between her breasts. She clucks at your cold yolk. She warms you, rolling and touching. It’s time for the television show about a detective who falls in love with a figure skater. The detective wants to protect her, but he finds her in the ice arena, throat slit. Because you’re an egg, you can’t see or hear the television, but in your fleshy carriage, you

by Jeffrey Hermann The New York Public Library Whoever invented blaming our mothers should stand up and take a bow. They couldn’t be here tonight so accepting the award on their behalf is their mother. She thanks the social sciences. The award for best original song most likely to end up in a Volvo commercial is a five-way tie. My favorite speech of the night was from that guy from that thing who came from nothing and suffered many setbacks and even poverty and was told to gi

by S A Greene Mikhail Preobrazhenskiy · The moray eel curled around your water steps in the mornings isn’t dangerous, but we advise you not to enter the water while he’s there. · If you do find yourself in the water with him, he may flash his glass-white teeth at you. Do not smile back. · If you do find yourself smiling back, the eel may murmur in a voice soft as mucous that he knows a reef, not far from the Resort, where the coral and the fishes blaze with colours so wondrou

by Renee Chen Benjamin DeYoung Editor’s note: This story about the Rohingya Genocide contains a scene of sexual violence. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.— Rumi Today, I tell you about Arakan, coastal country by the Bay of Bengal. We run our hands through the mud in rice paddies, brushing knots off the strings of unbloomed crops. We are Arab merchants crowding the bazaar, shawls choked by dust after our long nightly travels

by Gina Thayer Kelsey He The willow tree stands in the center of the furthest field. Only it is not a willow tree at all. Or, it was once a willow and now is something else. Instead of leafy tendrils, the tree dangles with human arms, their skins every texture and hue. They bear wrinkles and age spots and hearty blue veins. They sprout coarse dark hair and patches of orange freckles, birthmarks and moles and raised pink scars. Russet, peach, olive, onyx. They fidget and snap