When the birds go quiet, the girls stop walking. The air around them is glassy and pale, like a glass of milk their mother used to pour every morning: half milk, half water. When the birds go quiet, the girls can hear their own breathing: quick and light like cat paws...
51 stories made it to your longlist for this contest! Thank you all for trusting us with your writing! We'll be narrowing down our Shortlist of 25 for Judge Sara Lippmann's review! Pairs possible future for our daughter #683 Rowdy Yates Slept Here Roadkill Is Now and...
It was the night Johnny came back to town, one of those pent-up summer nights when the sky trembled heavy with unshed moisture, weighing us down, the burden of it pressing us into the dust, and we wanted to scream let go! but heaven wouldn’t unleash that water, held...
We’re having a late lunch, five women, widows now, who have been meeting once a month for forty years. “Dress-up time” we call it because when you are our ages—86, 87, 91, and 93-- few events encourage one to don a cape, drape a rope of pearls around a neck, or apply...
On the line, I run a double-forklift. It’s a lot like a regular forklift, but the forks both spread out on either side and when they fan out, you have to catch the grooves of both pallets just so at the same time. And you have to do it FAST. Also, the balance point is...
I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or...
It was supposed to be chess club, but instead, it was Gambler’s Anonymous, and that’s what you get in Moline. That’s what you get in church basements. It might be fried chicken, or it might be stale donuts, and I should have left right then, but I didn’t. I stayed. I...
Wolfsong (ELJ Editions 2023), Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s first full-length publication, is a gorgeous hybrid collection of flash fiction and CNF stories capturing formative moments in girls’ and women’s lives. There is pain in these stories. And longing. There are bad...
In science class, Margot teaches them about the magic of snow. “Evaporation, condensation, deposition,” she says. On the whiteboard she draws shapes connected by wiggly arrows. She’s tall and wiry, spine curved from decades of bending over small desks. Her face...
When I go in, the sink is bursting with unwashed dishes coated with moldy leftover scraps, half-filled glasses, cups that balance precariously on the counter rim, ripped open TV dinner boxes thrown on top; there isn't room for me to set aside the cleaned dishes....
Marvin’s tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears bile-colored Crocs, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained,...
The shades are pulled down by Mick before the summer sunsets. Mick is a regular: he spends every day, open to close, in the bar drinking Bacardi and Cokes and shots of Fireball. He buys drinks for everyone and tells them he loves them. He loves me the most; he’s...