Ma says girls should stand with their palms open so their bones learn how to stack themselves in circles, the strongest shape. Wheels are built out of circles, she says, and every weekend we visit the ferris wheel by the bay so we can count the number of cabins that...
We have nine snowmen in our front yard. One snow child. In the past month or two, I rolled, lifted, and balanced balls of snow for their snow bodies, searched for sturdy twigs. My wife peeled carrots, dumped raisins in a dish, ransacked closets for hats and...
These micro stories demanded more than one reading, invited us into their small containers, and awed us with the mysteries of being human. We're ecstatic to present these longlisted titles and will be back with the shortlist soon, which will be judged by Steve Almond!...
1. The Ghost of Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath is tired of things, but we have trapped her inside our minds, and we want more. She did her part, and she performed, but we are greedy, and we clap and cheer and stamp our feet for an encore, because she left too soon. Sylvia...
I’m riding shotgun with our big grandma of a fridge sticking out the back. She’s sandwiched between the hatch and the rusted bumper, tied by the rope from my tire swing. I rub her smooth metal top where she held my cereal. We’re headed to the dump. It’s where Dad...
We stand in front of the cameras dressed in red, white, and blue. We clutch pocketbooks and pearls, pull the silk scarves woven loose through our arms around bare shoulders. We smile into the lens with an unwavering tenacity we hope convinces the rest of the world—and...
What you leave out, when you tell the police about it, is how the woman reminded you of your mother—charismatic and brash, with short-cropped black hair greying at the temples. The woman had dark eyes that flashed when music played, and she drummed her fingers against...
She finds the rosary tangled in the bottom drawer of his dresser, amid balled socks and a single cufflink shaped like a compass rose. The beads are wooden—olive pits carved smooth by generations of thumbs. The crucifix hangs crooked, silver worn thin at the corpus,...
The bird was wild with fear. Entangled in the fishing-rod line—wings awkwardly stretched, feet dangling mid-air—it leaped and bounced and swayed, a puppet on a string dancing a macabre pas de deux over the wordless song of the waves. More frightened than the bird, the...
The dumb bomb that dropped on my mother’s house did not explode. Instead, it flattened the dinner table and severed the left leg of my uncle. He had just finished eating a bowl of chè đậu trắng, my favourite dessert, when the roof caved in on them. It was not an...
What did the octopus know? Each day at work, when Alice fed it or cleaned its tank or gave it some item to keep it busy—a rubber dog toy, a teething ring—she wondered. She watched its eight roving arms moving around the enclosure, all independent from whatever was...
She arrived at the ragged edge of the sea with four canvas totes. One for herself, and three for the children. Each bag sang faintly when it shifted, as if full of seashells or bones. The townsfolk watched her climb toward the old house on the hill. They thought she...