The men are dying. We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us. We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy and holier-than-thou—say it’s unnatural, say their boxes are wired wrong.…
There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear. He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in another country–everywhere, all at…
They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes. Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his knotted gut. “You’re quiet,” he says, admonishing himself for waiting until hope has ballooned inside…
Anthology 5 Shortlist
We finally curated a shortlist of 41 stories, and they’ve been sent to judge, Tara Isabel Zambrano! It’s out of our hands, and we can’t wait to see which stories Tara chooses to include in the final 20 for the anthology!
I Come From Aliens
There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head. Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve called the brown…
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