Bea makes her way down the back steps in Gerry’s old slippers, rag and bowl of warm water in hand. Among the lavender jacaranda petals step the three laying hens. The girls. Bea needs to check for signs of diarrhea. Wipe their chicken butts. Their Polly, home from...
Your phone screen shatters on impact. This is the first thing you think about. Not your collarbone, which has snapped clean; not the airbag’s chemical smell still burning inside your nose. The phone. You think: all those pictures. The paramedic has your wrist. She...
Mama says she must sleep for a long time. Her children do not understand. Her husband does not either, not completely. Of course the children have noticed how much Mama naps lately, how slowly she moves. How it’s been worse since the youngest one started school. When...
Fractured Lit is partnering with Discover New Art to award two $25,000 prizes, one in poetry and one in prose, each to a promising manuscript-in-progress to support the manuscript’s journey to publication. Five finalists in each category will also receive $1,000 awards.
I should like to collapse, right here on the bathroom floor, so thoroughly and completely that I bang my head, just enough for a noise, not a bleeding, not a concussion, but a thud declaring to the world: something is happening. Or at least, to my loved ones, who will...
Peter did not come home for the summer. We were dealing with it, his father and I. We knew how he felt about her, and we were happy. But the farm was too quiet. The kitchen was too clean and the handrails too polished, and most nights we could only talk of him and go...
I find one of your old contact lenses in the bath mat. Feel it under my big toe. A tiny ship. A coracle. Netted by some pubes and fibers. Has it really been that long since I shook out the mat? You hated its shag. Said it felt like stepping out of the bathtub onto...
Madhavi and I always race through the stone alley behind our houses to the makbara. The alley is rough; once I tripped and split my chin open. Five stitches. Since then, I don’t run fast. Madhavi wins the races, but I climb the monument quicker. We call it a monument,...
This fall, Fractured Lit invites you to take a deep-dive into the fun of writing microfiction! Join us for four live, ninety-minute workshops designed to spark your creativity and elevate your craft. Each individual workshop will cost $20. Or bundle all four together before the first class for $60. All workshops will take place over Zoom and a recording will be shared with everyone who registers, so you can participate no matter where you’re located.
Mama sends me to the deli down the corner to buy yeast because she’s making pogácsa, even though I don’t even like pogácsa because it’s too salty and too dry and looks too much like a toad, but Mama bakes it anyway because, as she says, “Mothers Bake Pogácsas”,...
I can see you clearly now you’re leaving — a child of the garden again, and yes, everything is better outside, and as you say, it always was this way; it always was. I drink tea while you paint the long legs of the table, turning them red to green. You will not rush...
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. I’m in the ochre of it, the end of morning. The light is thick, impasto, nearly edible. Across the courtyard I hear a woman singing to someone. What is the song? I keep looking at my body—how is it...