Fiction

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

by Allison Field Bell Ryan Hyde As a child, I did not fear spiders. I was fascinated by them — their leggy movement, their dark presence on a wall or in a corner. My mother once caught me reaching for a black widow in a woodpile, a lady spider with her fat shiny abdomen painted in that lipstick red hourglass. I wanted to feel her in my palm. I thought I could commune with animals. A secret language. An understanding. A stray dog in the road, for example: I shooed him away fro

by Bill Gusky Chris Curry It’s Spit’s turn. She zips over to a dusty web dangling from the peaky ceiling and, with a winsome glance at Holk, brushes her hairy butt against it until it sticks. Now she’s a tether fly. When she zooms, the web keeps her going in circles. She speeds up until the entire peaky ceiling buzzes. Slow down! You’re making me nauseous! That’s Holk, upside-down on the peaky ceiling, trying to follow Spit’s beautiful zooming face. I won’t I won’t I won’t sh

by Victoria Ballesteros Hans Hamann I rest my head against Mamá’s side, tucking myself under her arm as she knits. Her warm body shifts back and forth as I sway along, content. “Mamá,” I say. “Why are you making Lalo a sweater? It’s so hot.” Mamá laughs. “Mija,” she says, unraveling a stretch of yarn from the skein. “My children are my pedacitos, my little pieces. It’s my job to make sure you’re always warm, and safe, and fed.” “Oh,” I say, smiling. I like being one of her pe

by Timothy Boudreau Robert Anasch Tilden had discovered the announcement while scrolling through his phone during his lunch break: “Guinevere Allen, author of Spider Silk and Wasp Paper, Traverse the Infinite and Orchid, Ovid, Arachnid, will lead her first ever cross-genre workshop. Send a thousand-word sample of your best work and a thousand-word essay detailing why you wish to attend. Up to three successful candidates will receive an in-depth initiation into Guinevere’s uni

by Kik Lodge Steve Harvey There was this raven that used to come to our primary school. Stole gold stars and pushpins, snapped the nibs off our 2Bs, before Mr. Tomkins said can’t keep the stationary in jars, children, need boxes with clip-down lids, need to keep the windows only ever slightly ajar. The raven had been spotted at the supermarket thieving baubles from the Christmas tree; even found out where Bess the cleaner lived. Smashed its beak through her medicine cabinet a

by Robert Roman Gary Sandoz “Isn’t eleven too old to tug around a little red wagon?” Fantastic Freddie said with his big, fat mouth. “Isn’t twelve too old for Captain Altar Boy to pull his pants down past his knees just to take a whiz?” Jaggerbush sat in his Wave Motion Wagon and drifted down the Red Brick Alley one mile per hour. “Evel Knievel couldn’t make it across Snake River Canyon, but Jaggerbush made the Marshall Avenue Moon Shot in that wagon,” I said. “Jaggerbush is

by Julian Greenwood Dooley Kyle Johnson Luke, fifteen years old, handsome and stupid, yanked on the steering wheel of his daddy’s old Chevy Nova race car as it fishtailed us through the midnight parking lot of the abandoned Murder A&P. We called it the Murder A&P because before it was abandoned two summers ago, Jenny’s older half-brother got got there along with a couple of his buddies because they sold fake weed to some eleventh-grade lunatic with a revenge fetish. Jenny had

by Kyle Seibel David Higgs In the photo in question, the girl is young, no more than nine, dressed as a bride. Her father, mid-stride, beside her in a tux. His goatee cropped close. His gray skin hangs. A tight-lipped smile below zombie blue eyes. His name is Dan. Dan from work. Dan from the office softball league. Different from the Dan with the desk near the lobby. Different from the Dan in charge of new business. Not Tall Dan or Airsoft Dan or Mormon Dan or Hockey Dan. Thi

by Nadia Gerassimenko Jason Fitt After Returnal Prologue Where am I? What is this haunting house? Why is it here? How are there so many me not me, all perished? More questions return to me, unanswered. More answers I seek as I return again. A part of me is missing /in/ me here. It summons in a twisted warble. An astronaut goes everywhere I go, never letting go. I. Help is far from on its way. I must help myself, for me, for me before me. This land is foreign, feral. It is anc

by Audrey Snow Matzke Evie S./Unsplash For now she is 19 — young enough to be a prodigy — with her kitsch, and her camera, and her good technique. Her livestream is the same thing every day, and people love it: she draws the circle, perfectly, then turns the circle into something representational, like a snow-globe, or a record-player, or a wedding ring. XOEvylyn has fans. XOEvy1yn’s parents are mid-level diplomats. She tells her fans how, growing up, she never spent more tha

by Jane Camoleze Rene Böhmer Alarmed by the increasing evidence of sunlight, Ro-ro gave up on tickling the man´s cheek after the fourth attempt to wake him up, daring her antennae further and further into the cavity of his right ear. It was a Sunday. In one interesting exception, the man had an event to attend, and given his long-term mistrust of alarm-clocks, it was Ro-ro´s duty to make sure he was up when he had to, regardless of the calendar, so she swung her antennae left

by Tina Barry Sebastian Davenport-Handley I tell Henrietta how the flaps of carnival trucks waved like dirty elephants’ ears. In a day, the parking lot of our small strip mall reeked of all things sweet, and the twin tracks of the roller coaster carved arches in the sky. Carnies lounged in the sun, smoked in dormant teacups of a ride, snored in its saucers. One’s teeth glinted gold. At night they strutted, tough toms, shirts opened to cords of chest hair twisting north of the

by Claudia Monpere Alison Marras Janine and Haley were playing happily outdoors which relieved me because Janine didn’t like Haley the new kid who was a little weird but Haley’s mother and I were co-room mothers so I’d scheduled a playdate and when I asked Haley how many popsicle sticks her mother had for Monday’s picture frame project and she said 500 the tiny child inside me was jealous because I had only 298 but I said that’s great and honey why don’t you take your sweater

by Z.H. Gill Marco Biondi i My fiancée’s sister wears a teensy glass vial of kitty litter (ultra-fine, gray-as-dusk — and soiled, we think) on a red string around her neck wherever she goes. For good luck, she says. Sleeps in it, too. My fiancée tells me her sister didn’t take the family tabby’s death too well: Carl was his name. ii In his early middle age, Martino Joinville, the lauded Italo-British performance artist, began to shit in a litter box as part of the research pr

by Cole Beauchamp Zdeněk Macháček At the school gate, your mother lifts her narrow snout and scents trouble. Together you walk past the glossy moms flicking the sky with their shellacked nails, air kissing their daughters. As you pass there’s a collective intake of breath, low mutterings. Don’t do it, don’t do it, you chant under your breath. She does it anyway. Your mother passes in a flat-footed huff, baring her yellowed teeth at them. The circle tightens as they close rank

by Laura S. Marshall Anshu A/Unsplash My measuring cups are out of tune again. I bring them back to the tuner, two towns away. How strange that this keeps happening, she agrees. She says, Sometimes moisture gets to them. Keep your windows closed. On the way home, they ring and ring against each other, harmony spilling out to fill the car. I sing along; the insects sing along, the kids at the school, the rain. I set the measuring cups on the counter and close the kitchen windo