The speaker made us choose: “Your house is on fire. Family and pets are safe. What one thing would you take with you?” He hunted us with his eyes. Shoes squeaked over the gym floor, echoing in the frost of our hypnotic teenage lethargy, “…just one thing…” The bell...
That spring before, the crows on their farm were Don Corleone, leaving the heads of baby rabbits on their patio. The oversized infant teeth were bloody shards over soft pink tongues. Alec had told Libby he’d researched it. Crows were actually more intelligent than...
— Another Misadventure of The Broken Boys — The boys started climbing at first light. In the crisp air, their breath had the thickness of fog. They huffed heavily, eyes on the ground, already weary of dragging their shadows. The plan was to hike the ridge and obtain a...
Lost Centuries by Shome Dasgupta Motherhood: A Hexaptych by Candace Hartsuyker Nothing the Wind Might Sting by Edie Patterson A Nice Blue Place by David Byron Queen A Guide to Small Town Ghosts by Regan Puckett Lessons in Negative Space by Sara Hills
1/10 Grandma Kim had a rose-petal mouth. See the ballooned lips, half-inch creases trapping her mouth at each end. Such shapes are difficult to translate in their three-dimensional splendor on paper. She smiles, but a printed smile is not a living smile. I would like...
The receptionist, who I thought might be a robot, told me I could fill out the form online or else in the office with a No. 2 pencil. I chose the pencil. The hexagonal pencil, if you think about it, has a sophistication that only a highly advanced civilization could...
There used to be a village named for the future. It straddled la frontera like the saddles of the vaqueros who once lived there, whose bones are now particles of the Texas dust they farmed and irrigated a century ago. Before it went up in flames, the village sat on...
A sheep has escaped from the abattoir. It’s loose on the railway line that runs along the coast to the harbor and they’ve stopped the trains. You hear on the radio, the activists are out with placards, Meat is Murder, Ban Sheep Ships and the like. The police have been...
He’d be back soon, and she was glad to be cold. From the passenger’s seat, she’d watched him float up the dark path. His footsteps remained, half-inch depressions in new snow. It fell—blue-tinted gobs of it, the kind that made children’s mouths water. Sticky...
My father tells me the constant rush of water through our town is the whoosh of the world going round. The snow in the mountains never stops falling, never stops melting, never stops raging into the valley. Stern and roiling. Like the white noise of God and reason,...
1. During the space race days your parents sip Maxwell House in the morning, Beefeater before dark. Through bedroom walls you hear talk of traveling to the moon, Viet Cong soldiers, and Brezhnev. How it’s another Bay of Pigs and screw that. Over Sloppy Joe casserole...
It is a cast-iron frying pan filled with cigarette butts. The handle is just the right size for my hand and just out of reach on the freezer. It is an ashtray. That’s all it is, and I don’t want it. “You don’t want that,” Momma has told me many times, so I try not to....