A plane ploughs through the clouds as she scrubs and cleans the plugholes in the washbasins and the kitchen sink and the laundry and another plane ploughs when she mops the floors and washes the benches and polishes the windows and another plane ploughs when she...
First: Make sure your patient is safe. Hope that you gave the appropriate caveats when you told them that this visit is confidential, and make sure they don’t have any plans to hurt themselves or others. If they’re a minor, you may have to call Child Protective...
There are six of them. No, seven. They cycle out of the tower and into the night, following their headmistress. Their headmistress wears a habit. The girls wear cloaks, cloaks to hide their hunger. I cannot tell you where they are going, but I’ll tell you this: they...
Transformation magic is easy. Gold into straw, carriages into pumpkins: the witch had done it a thousand times before. The man knew this. Or, perhaps more accurately, the pebble knows this. The pebble sits in her pocket. Its companions are a dirty, wadded up tissue...
When I meet her, I say all the wrong things first. Wind the beautiful. Hair is yours. Meet me nice. Name I have. All this to say: I will save the right things for last. I recognize her from the wanted posters in the city where we are no longer allowed to speak. She is...
On the morning of her last day alive, Tía Reina awoke with a halo of bright pink aligning her forehead. “A fever,” she told us. “It will pass.” What she didn’t know then was that she had become a saint overnight (this we learned posthumously, after consulting a couple...
At some point, we’ll forget the rabbit’s name, how it came to die, the rush we were in to bury it, and when people ask, we’ll shrug, and Vince will snarl his upper lip in the way his body’s patterned to do since we went into care. But right now, we tip marbles and red...
The winner is The Breakfast Shift at the Usual New York Diner by Debra A. Daniel! Thank you, and congratulations to our shortlisted writers. We so enjoyed reading your stories about work/play for this challenge! HR by Chris Bruce The Librarian Dana Jaye Cadman...
There’s a beautiful beach. You get there by walking through a shady path, and then you’re on the soft sand. Some low hills far off, green and silver in the sun. There’s a couple on the beach. The woman on a towel with a hat to shade her eyes. The man in the water up...
I once fucked a guy in a redwood water tank. The kind that once held water caught from rain, maybe filled by the county every couple of months. The kind that now looks like a dorm room, a single bed pushed against rounded walls, a small fridge next to a tiny table and...
We're so excited to announce our Anthology 4 winners! Judge Morgan Talty chose 20 stories to be published both online and in print! Thank you to everyone who submitted and to our finalists. It's never easy choosing only twenty stories from all of the great ones we...
The astronaut pushes a wire cart through the supermarket. Their body is obscured beneath the thick, radiation-proof fabric. Their face hides behind the mirrored shield opaque enough to block the sun. We decide to assume the astronaut is a she, for women make better...