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

by Robin Wilder Adam Mathieu He wanted to be a paleontologist. Unearth fossils jutting from Montana sediment, all the femurs and mandibles of dragon lizards he learned were more like breeds of cockatrice than Jurassic Park attractions. Those dozens of dinosaur figurines migrating across his walls, the shelves housing ancient bedrock secrets, each one anatomically incorrect. He imagined them with feathers, the pillow-stuffed down of ducks and swans, thought maybe scaly monstro

by Glenn Orgias Piper Alpha during the 1988 disaster. Photo courtesy Cullen Inquiry. July 6, 1988. — Karen: This is all I know. Andre had taken to visiting the helideck of the Piper Alpha oil rig, looking from there out at the fog over the North Sea. He once told me that the sound of the foghorn on Piper Alpha was the sound loneliness would make if given a voice. 200 miles from Aberdeen it was. 170 feet below deck, the ocean smashed up against the pylons. A fall from the heli

by Nate Hirschtick Wesley Tingey Well one time we walked and walked and walked we must have walked a thousand miles it was nighttime all night we walked through the park up DeKalb and down Norstrand I took the G train home after I thought of you the whole way the way you had your books stacked on your dresser it was one on top of the other it was so impractical but you made it work so beautifully they were next to an antique lamp that your grandma gave you cool grandma I thou

by Brett Biebel Denis Shchigolev We’re still married, but my wife hasn’t forgiven me for Michigan City. I left her in an Airbnb. She was five months pregnant. My phone rang and rang, and I let it go, and she sat on the floor and cried, worried sick. The place we were staying didn’t have Wi-Fi. It was more like glamping than anything, just a two-room shack with a kitchenette and a TV with a DVD player and a digital antenna, plus a monster king-size bed. You could tell all the

by Maximilian Martini Savannah Bolton Barefoot and bloodshot, he kneels in the yard and faces the house. In the dirt, between every blade of grass, lie innumerable diamonds. They reflect the light of day a billion fold, coruscating beneath the house’s one window. The diamonds were the window. And then the pane broke into infinity. — - Each diamond is a caustic little rainbow. He works to grip them tight between his fingers and bank them in the trash bag at his side. But they

by Meg Pokrass Nada Gamal 1. Eleanor Rigby stands in the hallway wearing her mother’s wedding gown. Once a year, she puts it on to admire the flow. She is solitary dreamer who belongs here because she doesn’t belong anywhere else. A secret janitor perpetually sweeping up rice in a church where a wedding has been. 2. She is the most famous lonely person in Liverpool. Or maybe she never lived in Liverpool, and she is lonely while listening to the Beatles’ song. She is a late-mi

by Claire Guo Bank Phrom They say I came from a lineage of muckrakers, men and women who lived in the dirt of others. When I was born, I emerged from rot and magazine headlines, scornfully red and already screaming about extramarital affairs, about someone’s unpaid speeding ticket. My mother knew at once that I would be a successful journalist because I clamped my toothless mouth to her teat and didn’t let go, even when she smeared hot sauce over the reddened nipple. A fine s

by Rachel Weinhaus Casey Horner The first girl to kiss a boy was my best friend, Lauren. She was a full year younger than me, only in fourth grade when she kissed that floppy-haired teenager behind our cabin. She said his lips tasted like vanilla Chapstick. The first girl to lose her virginity was Sara, a girl I went to high school with. The tattooed man said he loved her. She wanted to believe him. Sara never loved the tattooed man, but I don’t think he meant his promise eit

by Matt Kendrick 은 하 the living-room carpet is a fever of wrapping paper scrunched into balls / it is Christmas day / Peter has bought a bicycle for his angelfish / Charlotte is staring at me as if I’m the last remaining Brussels sprout / her lips are loose from the ten o’clock sherry / the children’s are looser / they tell me I am old because I still use emojis / face with diagonal mouth emoji / face in clouds emoji / at dinner, Mother moans because we are an uneven number /

by Jon Steinhagen Photo by أخٌ‌في‌الله on Unsplash INTRODUCTION After what was done to Grady Seppellant (as of this writing he is still on display, and the birds have been at him), we have been tasked with the creation of this guidebook not only for the use of hapless strangers and curious tourists, but for ourselves, as many of us may want to venture out once again, for fresh air, for exercise, for liberation, and everyone needs to be as well-informed as possible before this

by Lauren D. Woods Ian Hutchinson I could be found on the bottom floor of a government building making spreadsheets. The important thing was to make the columns neither too wide nor too narrow, so that they filled the page and printed evenly. I learned to create clean squares with clean borders. No, not that kind. Those were being closed down everywhere. What I mean is that there was a sort of satisfaction in the quiet clicking into place of the spreadsheets and fitting and f

by Cuyler Meade Milad Fakurian I met a man last night. He had one of those faces you think you’ve seen before, but you just can’t place. We laughed and talked all evening. Oh, heavens, he was lovely. He asked many questions, not like other men who just want to blather on about themselves. He asked about my family, my children. I told him of my husband, George, and he didn’t seem threatened that I once had a man in my life. You don’t always get that. I let him put me to bed, b

by Diane D. Gillette Andras Kovacs The massacre wasn’t planned. Not exactly anyway. But it got lonely only coming out of our rooms to dance with future husbands whose hands couldn’t tell the difference between the smalls of our backs and the rounded curve of our rears. It got tiresome trying to make conversation only to be told to keep our opinions to ourselves. Perhaps if we’d been allowed to talk to someone other than each other, we might not have heard the call of the bria

by Jaime Gill Lolita Ruckert …you’d munch popcorn and settle in your seat while the opening titles play over the boy’s bus journey home through sullen Northern England, ominous overhead drone shots intercutting with images of the hero’s pale and anxious face (but this is not a horror film and the boy sits alone — earbuds in, eyes closed, forehead leaning against the clammy school bus window — listening to Lana Del Rey and imagining himself sprawled in a white convertible some

by Sarah Lynn Hurd Glitch Lab App Ten seconds is a lot longer than you think. Your whole life can change in ten seconds, or nine for that matter. If you’re anything like me, you might easily lose yourself on a brisk autumn walk, especially if you know the route without thinking about it. I like to walk to the beat of a song, and I like to walk fast. I’m talking 150 BPM. I’m talking elevated heart rate. I’m talking let’s break a sweat, little lady! Nine seconds, like I said, i

by Brooksie C. Fontaine Kristina Sammer That year, we became obsessed with Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. To a lesser extent, we were interested in JFK, whom we perhaps unfairly treated like the optional Ken doll to our favorite Barbies. We went as them that Halloween — which, in hindsight, could be regarded as tasteless. Our costumes, and the stereotypes associated with them, ran counter to our personalities. I went as Marilyn, because I looked more like her. I was the b

by Andrew Graham Martin Haberdoedas Sometimes, when Mike lifts his arm to grab something, I see her. She’s there on his forearm, wreathed in a golden banner which reads “JASMINE” in a sans serif font. Her hair is a choppy sea and she has a mole on the right of her hip. One night as Mike sleeps I try whispering to her. “Is your name actually Jasmine?” There’s a long, harrowing pause before she answers. “…Are you actually a skeleton?” My body shivers like a tuning fork. I consi

by Joshua Vigil Julien Tromeur She thought maybe I’d contracted the disease on the plane. Planes were so stuffy, Margot said. The people so sick and leaky. I have a tailbone issue, she said, that I’m sure I got from some wild bacteria in the air. It’s like how cucumbers are sixteen inches nowadays. Bacteria sticks! We were at work — we scooped up the trash inside airplanes between flights — when the captain interrupted. I’ll show you sixteen inches, he said, pumping his pelvi

by Lio Abendan John Royle I have been dreaming on unstable legs, hooves dipped into stagnant water, algae stained up the tawny side of my ankles. When they buckle like still-green sprigs, I pitch forward into the pond and emerge with my lashes dripping, blinking my murky eyes clear. Elain and the others nose me back towards the shore. They chide me for dreaming, their ears flicking at flies, but when I hang my head in penitence I hear them whisper between themselves, susurran

by Spencer Nitkey Yilei (Jerry) Bao In 1991, the artist Damien Hirst took a tiger shark from the ocean — well, to be specific, a fisherman took the shark from the ocean — so Damien Hirst took a shark from a fisherman who, at his request, had taken it from the ocean and submerged it in a steel-framed glass tank filled with formaldehyde. He titled the piece “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” The millionaire who had paid him 60,000 something dol

John K. Peck Jaap Straydog The smell of mushroom soup filled the small house. Mother carried the large black pot to the table, and Father brought out the small bowl of crisp fried bits to sprinkle into it. “What did you say these were again?” asked Mother. “Pfifferlings,” replied Father. “They go well,” said Mother, sipping her soup. “I agree,” said Father, sipping. “Toothsome.” As if to prove his point, he chewed slightly. “I always liked that word,” said Mother. Several mom

by Nancy Connors Daniel Sinoca And on the third night, the younger sister spilled her milk again, and their father slammed his hand on the table and said, “Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?” and the mother scrambled to mop it up, and the older sister leaped to help, and the younger sister began to weep, and their father yelled out, “Sit down!”, and the mother and older sister sat, and silently they watched the milk flow over the tablecloth, and their father ate, staring a

by Liz Stewart Vincent van Zalinge Love is growing inside me. I float in fields of honeyed grass. Me and a colony of grasses, a worm, a milkweed, a thistle, and a family of ants form a messy row on the ground. Here is the place my mother watched for birds. She called it sanctuary. Her ashes were scattered here. I am pregnant and my baby is love. My baby craves birdsong and makes me throw up the sound of Ninja blenders. It doesn’t matter how pure my wife’s intentions — she’s m

by David Luntz Bob Brewer I had this dream once about an ape playing with a hand grenade. I even wrote a story about it [1]. In the story it’s unclear whether I live or die when the ape pulls out the pin and swallows the grenade. The story had a line that went, “Each passing moment plays its own requiem no matter what we do.” I am not sure what I was trying to say by it. Nor am I sure what the story meant. Maybe the ape represented fate or chance. Maybe the story was about th

by Karla Hirsch Ekaterina Boltaga PART I — THE LOSS In this story, the reason is not relevant. One day, the person you’ve shared gestures and words with for the last x years, is gone. They left / you drove them away / they found a new life / they misplaced the keys. The most outrageous versions of their leaving you, read like fictions: they went out to buy cigarettes and never came back / they joined a cult because life is overwhelming, babe / they’ve had a two-year affair wi

by Kathryn Kulpa Ian Taylor I don’t know if what we did could be called love. A furtive scrabble in the dark underpasses between our other lives. In someone’s empty office, in convention center greenrooms. I was always asking you for something. Breath mints. Safety pins to pull myself together. Things you never carried. Our affair was like a tangerine, juicy but just too seedy. We’d try to give each other up, then fly together after two weeks, thirsty, lost, your hands holdin

by Ani King Alex Begin To park two big ass trucks too close together at a gas station, both rumbling up and shuddering to a stop, nose-angled at each other over the painted lines? What if you park two trucks too close together on purpose after your ten-year high school reunion, still rumbling and shuddering to a stop, but this time in the parking lot of a motel two towns over? And what if you park two trucks together two towns over and you rent one of those motel rooms with a

by Sarp Sozdinler Hans Isaacson WHO: The girl, eight going on nine, half-Assyrian, half-blind, born in the north bend of Southeastern Anatolia, a daughter to Aisha Maria Rohan, by way of Raqqa, by way of her father’s motherland, formerly a struggling second-grader, now a farmhand to her grandparents, lies sidelong on the side of a dirt road, her arms scissored backward, her head a porcelain doll lolling in a puddle of rainwater slowly reddening around the edges, the rivulets

by Barlow Adams Sies Kranen My wife’s tracks in the mud mingled with those of the ducks until I couldn’t tell where anything began or ended. From the house to the creek at the edge of our yard and back, a parade of webbed feet encircling the memory of my wife’s careful, deliberate steps, her stride short, the way people walked when they were carrying something precious. Her attachment didn’t bother me at first. I thought it could even be positive after we had to give up the b

by Michael Czyzniejewski Sander Sammy When the marauders came, Abel made sandwiches. He knew soldiers were always hungry, and if there’s one thing that might save his skin, it was a good spread. He considered fanning out the meats and cheeses on his largest serving tray, letting the marauders pick what they wanted, but he decided to make and tag everything himself. The largest plate held ham and cheddar, surrounded by several turkey and Swiss, a few roast beef and jack, and a