Clouds like spores riding the gusts of wind, still raining, no beach today. We're lying on the couch together, heads on opposite ends, my smooth legs sliding over his brittle, hairy shins. He wants to feed me yogurt, but I can't reach. I stick my tongue out, then open...
When I grew breasts, I stopped taking the bus to school. Instead I walked along the edge of the wetlands that protruded like a dank finger between my home and school. It was seven and a half times longer than the walk to the bus stop, but it was safer to be alone....
Let’s say they believed her. Let’s say she was born into a different age. That she wasn’t the one who burned. Or: Maybe in another life, she is the favorite camp counselor. She teaches the kids to ride horseback. She tells them to get back up when they fall. She wipes...
We carry out the unction for our aging father on the dining room table, anointing him with a variety of substances: stale lake water, ripe oil that dripped down the jagged walls of caves back home, that spiced, buttery potion that our mother makes just like her own...
I ran over a nightjar with my car. It wasn’t my fault—it sat there roosting in the right lane of the road. I was on the phone with my brother when it happened; he’s apprenticing in ear-nose-throat. He’d changed rotations, went straight there from gyno. They’re all...
Twenty-five fresh and original takes on this contest's themes are headed to our guest, Judge Aimee Bender! We can't wait to reveal her selections! Dear Goldilocks Heart of Stone The Incantation The Nesting Doll Paradigm The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep Heterothermy He is...
Now that the Arctic isn't cold anymore, The Blob is awake and tearing through malls like a post-breakup trust fund baby. After it drinks the oceans dry, The Blob returns to North America. The 24-hour news cycle was made for this. On their websites, you can watch the...
For only seventy-seven dollars, the TV preacher promises God will grant me a miracle. He clasps his hands in prayer, gold rings glinting, while I clasp the telephone, punching the numbers from the TV screen that casts the room in a greenish glow. “There, there,” the...
Michael Czyzniejewski, who is the interviews editor at the flash fiction magazine Smokelong Quarterly, has written four collections of short stories. His most recent is The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023), which writer Mark Polanzak describes as a...
I bury my dead in this garden. Over there, under the cabbage roses. They haunt me through the day. At night, they sleep in the shadow of a fig tree with branches as wide as an archangel’s wings. I used to sit there and knit the smallest of garments. I chose thin...
We asked for new ways to tell these kinds of stories, and these 52 writers did not disappoint! We're working on getting down to a shortlist very soon. We can't wait to send it to our guest, Judge Aimee Bender! Dear Goldilocks Snow White and the Sleep Study Heart of...
For two years now, Leonard’s wife hasn’t wanted to have sex with him. He figures it might have to do with her mother passing, or maybe it’s because both their kids are in college and the house is empty. Maybe it’s biological. He has no idea. Hell, for all he knows, it...