I get to relive one day. That’s all. For me, a crash ended everything, but the full range of trauma runs through our circle. Every form of loss. An assault stole one woman’s child. For another, it was a cult. Disease. Suicide. Accidents. Plain old bad luck. There are...
Character and Expression class. Monday. A black box theater. The teacher clutches her cross pendant, “We must be looking above the characters. We must see things others can’t.” She paces the perimeter of the circle. “Come to class with a meaningful object and place it...
The town scalper says he lost his eyes at the supermarket. Left them on a shelf in the toothpaste aisle, and when he came back, they were gone. I say maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough, and neither of us laugh. My sister keeps a jar of two brown eyes on a shelf in...
—finally, it is night and you wrench the bulb from the porch ceiling and all the moths plop to the floor and you traverse the rug of ripped wings and squashed thoraxes and the sounds of your boots pierce my chest but this time there is no blood and the pain I'm...
We bury Lil Fucker facing north in the frozen yard, halfway between the dogwood tree and the rusted tin shed, in the spot where he liked to shit. Daddy Lin tamps the dirt with the back of the shovel and hocks a pink gob onto the snow next to Lil Fucker’s fresh grave....
But not really. It’s a nickname, something my sister used to call me. You wouldn’t know my real name. He never did. I wasn’t the first one he killed. I wasn’t the last. Not quite. I was part of the long fade but not the final coda. He was shooting for 100. I was #94....
In the time that my mother has been missing, the skies have turned a gray, roiling mass. The radio is calling it the most violent typhoon to make landfall in thirty-two years. We’ve looked everywhere, and there’s nowhere else left except here, in the ruins of the...
Does Love exist? Is fat meat greasy? Cuz ain’t no way I could’ve fallen so hard, so fast, so far, by myself. Rewind that. I didn’t fall in love. Like Toni Morrison said, I rose in it. If only for one night. I levitated for that brother with the high-top fade, tired...
We'll be publishing 16 total stories from this contest and we're so excited about Judge Sara Lippmann's choices! Thank you all for trusting us with your writing! Grand Prize Winner: For a Short Time Only by Holly Burns 15 Finalists (in alphabetic order) are: Pairs by...
One day Neela will run inside and steal me away. The other wigs roll their eyes. They smell the hope on me—a sticky sweet decay like garbage abandoned in the sun. They believe in Second Girls, not fairy tales. They did not hear the story I did: how one of us (miracle...
The traveler isn’t lonely. The ghosts of dead oceans joined the ship soon after the first onion sprouted in the tin of soil the traveler built in their quarters. The ghosts of dead oceans tell the traveler things like, “That light is giving me a headache,” and “Is it...
I find my boyfriend’s car parked in front of the Hillside Motel and consider shattering the windows or, at least, peeing on the windshield. But that’s bad for business. Not my business because, technically, he’s my ex-boyfriend and, fortunately, it’s my grandmother’s...