When no one was looking, we built planes in the backs of classrooms. We built them poorly, and they rarely flew. We rarely tried to send them airborne. Mostly, we wrote on them—notes penned deep into the wings or penciled along the sharp belly at the bottom. Discovery...
I watch my daughter ready herself for the funeral. She smears on white foundation and black lipstick, the way her friend taught her to. Every time that girl came over, they’d practice dolling each other up in lacy dresses and ghostly face paint. I don’t know if it’s...
The girl is not real. She’s known it for some time now. Since she learned that most little girls don’t practice their words and smiles in a mirror; don’t feel the tingling of the fluorescent lights; don’t linger on the edges, always watching, searching for the rules...
Dolly churns ewes’ milk until her palms blister red, fills her paper-lined pockets with soft and pliant butter, smuggles it out of the dairy before the rooster calls in dawn. Father doesn’t notice the loss. While he goes to market, she crawls through the knot at the...
Our father won’t want to die. But he is curious, and I will see it when he finds a seam while everyone is sleeping and slips through. Our father won’t want to die, but there will be the time we are all called at four am, Traumahawk having scraped him from the road,...
Come, come. Sit beside me on this rock; it’s much more comfortable than it looks. Listen to me: all I want is to listen to you. Tell me everything: how you worry about losing your job, how your boss doesn’t appreciate your good ideas, how you worry about...
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...