so I know you are eggs. Sunny side up, salmonella-scrambled, salsa-slathered, over-hard yellow-white discs fried in bacon grease until the edges curl like wispy brown lace. Your dad was the original egg man, eating five every day, insisting you ate at least three. One...
The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands. “What about candles?” you ask, and the nervous girl...
I used to tell people that my first kiss was on a December night, under a pine tree, when a boy I sort-of liked kissed me after a dance recital; but actually my first kiss was older, and with a woman. In this memory, I’m twelve (it’s seventh grade), and I wake up one...
Here is what you’ll bring to grandmother’s house: two eggs flour cocoa powder a baggie of your mother’s herbs from her grow closet (for her glaucoma, your mother claims, and don’t even think of sneaking any) the bill from QVC with STOP GIVING THEM MY ADDRESS in your...
I know something is wrong when the spot in the corner of my right eye won’t go away. I was hit until I saw stars, years ago and not by you, but this is different: this isn’t a star but a fuzzy gray cloud. Whenever I read, it floats along with me on each line, blotting...
We want to celebrate the 39 stories on our Anthology Four shortlist! We loved reading these stories, and we can't wait to see which ones Judge Morgan Talty chooses! tell me how it works Protocol for What to Do After Hearing Another Rape Story in Exam Room Five...
“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” Obediently, they turn, bare flesh sliding smoothly against the porcelain, and dangle foolish coltish legs over the side of the bath. “Look at me, not each other. Hats off your faces. Scoot closer. That’s right...
Last stop on the LL line. Subway platform outdoors, a track on each side. A green-lit bulb above each track. The bulb goes green on one track, then on the other, and the people race back and forth from one train to the other, spitting out curses. Up in the control...
Every thought and prayer was answered. Everything reversed. The news crews packed their vans with cameras and microphones, and the people they were interviewing, some of them covered in blood, most of them elderly, floated back into the grocery store. The produce...
As she kills the flies, Gloria asks for mercy, then sprays an insecticide that sticks to the walls for weeks. Since her roommate is gone, her apartment is filthy, and the flies seem to regenerate in every corner of the ceiling and fly out of every pipe. Sometimes,...
We’re not allowed to leave the yard, even when the other kids are playing in the wooded triangle everyone calls the island right across the street because ticks, our mom says, cars, teenagers, glass, so we watch from the back gate, which is warped shut and too high to...
That story you’ll never tell is the house on the street in every Seventies horror movie you devoured in the blue fug of your best friend’s mother’s cigarette smoke. The story you cannot tell has shutters and a deck and a swinging For Sale sign. Do you carry a lot of...