but she is always multiplying, like a rabbit. In this version of the universe, Sally is only nine years old but she is always afraid, afraid of food poisoning, of losing her sense of smell, of screwdrivers that twist in the night. Evenings, she sits on her couch and...
First Place: Raising Rabbits by F.E. Choe 2nd Place: Burn It All Down by Karen Jones 3rd Place: Casual Pinch, 1992 by Alice Kaltman Raising Rabbits by F.E. Choe Will These Elevator Doors Never Open by Robert Clementson Hope by Rebecca Donley Aquatic Mammal by Shayla...
The air raid sirens sounded and my brother Bruno scrambled, demanding to know where my basement was. I didn’t have a basement and informed Bruno it was the monthly test, that there was no attack, but Bruno started stacking canned goods, rifling through cupboards. I...
The swaddled newborn startles awake at a quarter to midnight. I plug his mouth with a powder blue pacifier bearing an elephant with a right ear so large it emerges stone soft, shaded blue, white sharply outlined. The eye drawn in a horseshoe shape makes it somehow...
This little boy has forgotten how he was made. He is old enough to know he can’t ask his teddy bear, but he is still young enough to love that bear and believe that it can feel the same pain and joy that the boy does. This boy knows he can’t ask his mother because she...
Raising Rabbits Will These Elevator Doors Never Open Hope Aquatic Mammal Anchorite A Strange, Silent Relief My husband said, keep baking bread Self-Solemnization Burn It All Down Casual Pinch, 1992 Monday Bath Cuckoo Drapes Coexistence A Lovely Light Pelican Hold Fast...
The secret to sin is to do it in secret. We learned secrecy young—two girls taught to swallow our hunger—so we meet up at nightfall once the last lights have gone out. We walk down the roads, cursing this town full of coal-miners and farmers and churches, cursing the...
How pointlessly beautiful, a tree. How massive and calm and sometimes crushing and on fire. How a tree’s waving branches remind me of her hair that one afternoon, the breeze, the yellow shore. Everything so different and the same. How gentle, a tree. How full of knots...
Louis liked the name: Prospect Cemetery. As if its prescient eighteenth-century builders had known that one day college boys would come there to look for one-night boyfriends. Louis himself found no prospects in Prospect Cemetery. He tried but they didn’t find him...
No time left in Jackie’s thumbs. They died before the rest of her, dangled precious on jagged hipbones, in and out of false pockets. Useless. Amputation was out of the question. Her son moved in to lift cartons of milk, boxes of cereal, orthopedic pillows. Take out...
Children play on street corners until the lights grow dim and the stars are visible like pinpricks on a bulletin board. Dinner is an any-hour activity of bologna sandwiches and watered-down Kool-Aid. There’s no urgency for the children in getting home at a particular...
Once a week a truck driver drove down our street. Stuck to the sides of the semi were two television screens. Massive plasma bastards. The screens always promoted something new: shoes, video games, the dentist running for president, carrying wisdom teeth in a bag. The...