Calligraphy
By Shanyn Fiske
Sometimes, when the children are especially troublesome, Meilin tells them about the Red Guard who sliced open a girl’s neck and poured salt in the wound.
genre: Fiction
The House Wren
By Jennie Rathbun
It was a Sunday morning in late May, toward the end of the warbler migration. We had just come in from a bird walk at the cemetery in Cambridge. We hadn’t seen many birds, because I was unable to get Maeve out of bed early enough, but I have learned to hold my tongue when… Read more »
Full-Service Fat Girl
By Richard Downing
— Columbus, Mississippi,1973 For a long time now she has referred to herself in the third person, almost as if she were being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Except that she will never be interviewed by Barbara Walters, because she – not Barbara – pumps gas for a living. And because she –… Read more »
Once We Were Young
By Vanessa Nirode
Part 1: Satan Drives a Tow Truck My tomato red 1980 Ford Pinto hatchback speeds north on the QEW toward Toronto. The year is 1991, before Google Maps, MapQuest, iPods and cell phones. I am driving because I am the only one who can operate a manual transmission with ease. And the car belongs… Read more »
Wild Things
By Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable Loulie peeks out at the old woman from her position on the floor, her head between her knees, her legs scrunched up between… Read more »
SHORT SHORT
Hallways
By Bryan Carvalho
I remember being in a hallway, at the end of that hallway was a corridor, with the option to go left or right. If I went left down the corridor at the end of the hallway, at the end of that corridor, was an elevator. If I went right down the corridor at the end
By Valerie Miner
You glance out the window at the tranquil spring evening. Three stories down to the glorious almond blossoms and purple magnolias dazzling the campus after long dreary rains. Northern California heaven.
By Estela González
Magali and I crossed the street to the Richardson’s. Nine o’clock in the morning: a good time to get rid of things.
By Jerry Whitus
He would put in just south of Jacque Rosier Baygall, where she’d put in, and paddle downstream one-and-a-quarter creek miles to the sandbar
By Gary Percesepe
Gabrielle pulls up to a Conoco gas station. “I need to use the restroom. You need anything?”
By Amrit Chima
The daughter waves a hand in front of her mother’s face, fascinated—and alarmed—by the half visible irises
By Sean Gandert
The Tech didn’t notice new patients any more.
By Patricia Ann McNair
My mother was a toucher. She tapped her fingers on my wrist, and even though I was sixteen, not really a girl anymore, I loved it, the feel of her pink touch. Such small hands. You couldn’t help but notice.
By Jim Meirose
Guts and glory too; at the trial in the box he said No, no, no. But, he lost. You stole that truckload of sombreros, Mister Lucas! cried the Judge.
By Susan Muaddi Darraj
Hell, yes, it was a bad winter: first, Riham’s father gets sick with pneumonia. Two weeks at Greater Memorial, and they’re talking about putting him on a ventilator before he finally looked at a bowl of grey oatmeal and said, “I’m hungry.”
By James Anderson
The Hat Salesman takes a breath before continuing. That’s when she says: “Look, you’ve got this whole Woody Allen thing going.
By Susan Donovan Bernhard
A hawk banked in the gray daybreak, head hunched, eyes darting beneath a cross of wings. What could it see? Nothing scampered or skittered along the ice, nothing gamey or meaty worth a closer look, nothing with fight.
By Liza Ketchum
They asked for a story about a “First.” First what: Kiss? Too embarrassing. Date? Forget it.
By John Brown Spiers
Claude Charles is an uncomfortable millionaire. He works hard to hide what he calls his “creeping suspicion—that something is not right.”
By David Low
When Emily Wong moved to Manhattan from Poughkeepsie, she started to freak out on elevators. It began at Saks Fifth Avenue.
By Vincent Craig Wright
The moon glaring above Table Rock’s got me thinking about our field trip up there in ninth grade and falling in love with this girl I never knew before.
By Steven Huff
Wayne and Abby kept an open package of sleeping pills just sitting around the way another couple might keep a dish of exotic bitter candy that appears to be for anyone to grab
By Steven Huff
Before I became her darling I towed wrecked machines down the river behind my rowboat. Any kind of wreck you’ve got.
By Elizabeth Searle
“Ma’am? You may have to leave.”
By Eric Charles May
When Clarion Woodbury was a boy, we’re talking the early 1960s, the New Orleans house of his grandmother was a not very wide, three-story building set on the northwest corner of a shady block.
By Jenifer DeBellis
The roads are slick, freshly coated with autumn leaves mixed with last night’s rain.
By Catherine Bell
Our house was the finest house in town, on the highest point of rocks, with the widest view of Boston and the islands and the open sea.
By Nahid Rachlin
A brittle ray of sunlight is shining on the wall across from me. I want to say, “Cold, I’m cold,” but no words come out.
By Kim McLarin
My mother is dressed and ready to leave the house, but five minutes before we’re supposed to walk out the door
By Lew McCreary
SO MANY of the girls were lost. Miss Guo would just look at them and see the truth and the future all in one glimpse.
By Richard Perry
Quentin relieved his mother at two-thirty. Abigail, wearing an ash colored dress, touched three fingers to her cheek
By Mardith Louisell
It had been thirty-seven months since I’d moved to California and my adjustment had been minimal.
By Thrity Umrigar
She is lying in a bed in the ICU, her mouth wide open to accommodate the hose of the ventilator, her bony arms blackened by the assault of the tubes running in and out of her body.
By Bruce Pratt
I passed the early afternoon lunching with Massimo at his restaurant, Il Pescatore, which he was readying for the season.
By Dar Thomas
You just don’t go knocking on someone’s door and tell her you’ve been watching her for the last couple months. They have a word for that.
By Erika Sanders
The nurse pointed down the long hallway. “He’s in room 202.” She looked Elle over head to toe. “He told me he didn’t have a girlfriend.”
By Elizabeth Gonzalez
My questions never shocked you, my appeals to fact. You never ran crying from the room or shunned me when I called out your father, your book.
By Karima Grant
When the Cheikh called to inquire whether Aicha was in New York, Rama could not lie.
By Thomas Benz
When the Carnahans moved to Spirit Island Estates, it was one of those decisions that on paper looked like a sure thing, a natural path
By Girija Tropp
My husband Ireland wanted me to quit as a physician and join him on a trip to Italy. I wasn’t thrilled.
By Blair Fross
Mrs. Donovan never prepared herself for motherhood. How she had become Mrs. Donovan, living as wife and mother, was still a bit blurry to her.
By Sean Conway
If there was a bright side in all of this—and Charley was certainly looking for a bright side—it was that Kate hadn’t driven off with his fingers still stuck in the door.
By Danielle Monroe
Your girl doesn’t call. Why would she? You haven’t heard from her in five days. She isn’t your girl. She was never your girl.
By Laura Williams McCaffrey
In the light of the gibbous moon, beneath the thick boughs of ancient oaks, a girl pulled her brother from the gingerbread house, trailed by smoke that stank of burned sugar and flesh.
By Robert M. Herzog
Cedric wasn’t drunk. Spirits from the spirits, he told himself. That was a sober man’s thought, wasn’t it? The neck of the bottle was in his mouth.
By Marion de Booy Wentzien
Vincent and Harry have come to install broadband. Zip has convinced me we need this more than we need new kitchen cabinets. Never mind that all the cupboard doors are sprung and that the only way to shut the cupboards is with rubber bands twisted three times. Both guys are short and have buzzed hair with a slash on one side.
By David Sahl
A cool, misty fog collects in her hair. Fine droplets gather and flow in tiny rivulets following the smile lines of her face. They slide from her jaw to dampen and discolor her thin blouse. She doesn’t notice.
By Christopher Anderson
Dottie was pregnant. I was a math instructor at Seattle Community College. There was an Indian summer that September, not a drop of rain until the 20th. One warm and windy day I took my 5-year-old son Philip to Lincoln Park with a kite.
ESCAPE ARTIST
Maga
A Psalm
Gabrielle
ON THE BLACK SEA, WE FLOAT
Rehabilitation Wing
This hadn’t always been the case
My Mother’s Daughter
Mister Lucas’ Punishment
The Fall
The Hat Salesman
Winter Loon
Shotgun Summer
The Uncomfortable Millionaire
Elevor
Table Rock
Dukkha
The Hudson
THE QUIET CAR
The deep Godlike voice from the train’s loudspeaker, only live. Anne stiffens in her seat in the Quiet Car.
An American Family
Before You Can Change Your Mind
House on the Rocks
Eye Clinic
Border Dance
Miss Guo
Laugh, Run, Sing, Bark
Strategic Allocation of Attention
The Cup of Bitterness
Marble
Shadow Dancer
Between the Wounded
0 = 1
The Education of Aicha
House Crawl
Real Women
The Road Kill Retrieval Kit
Knuckle Sandwich
Salsaholico
Hansel and Gretel
Totem
Connections
Look Away
The Kite
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