Jolene McIlwain's Sidle Creek, a collection of flash and short stories, is amazingly balanced between characters we care about and the joy and conflict in the natural world. This book will take you into the heart of the natural world, where it's easy to imagine the...
Toodle-loo, Kangaroo The last known living slender crawfish died in a small pool (technically, a kitty litter box, but perfectly effective as a small pool) in an off-campus university laboratory in Sydney, New South Wales. A thin antenna released from the body and...
All winter, Grandpa seems frailer, like he’s entering a final phase. His living room’s cluttered, he hasn’t shaved, and we wonder if he’s remembering to brush his teeth. When he says goodbye, watching us put on our boots, his blue eyes blur, jelly candies softening...
I wake up to your moaning while releasing yourself in the bathroom without bothering to run the faucet or the shower, and a slick stream gushes out from deep inside me, not a normal period, but a deluge that started yesterday after a dry patch of three months, the...
Metaphors for a Tumor Like a spaceship was flying through a meteor shower in her boy’s skull. Knock knock, he’d say, and when she answered who’s there, he’d giggle and say nothing; the spaceship had blown it all to smithereens. Like a plane that’s flown too low and...
They would have told you not to go to that party. Bowls filled with candy and condoms. Tequila. Vodka. Rum. Bottles lining the counter. You and your friend, hiking across a closed golf course because the security guard wouldn’t let any of you into the condo’s parking...
Mother says her voice is a visitor in the theater of her throat. The play must not be splendid, she says, because many characters—the woman with the crooked hat, the man who looks like he has two bellies, the couple in love stuck together like flower petals in the...
After twenty-five years and an hour of cash bar drinks, the ballroom-sized venue is stuffed with chatter and assessment. From classmate to classmate, you listen to the stories fat with nostalgia or self-regard, all of them rooted in achievement. You nod and smile and...
“An enslaved African woman, unable to prevent her children’s sale into slavery, placed some rice seeds in their hair so they would be able to eat when the ship reached its destination...However, as they disembarked the slave ship, the planter who eventually bought...
After dinner, after you have wiped down her highchair, the tray, the peeling surface of the kitchen table, after you have gotten down on your hands and knees and scraped the crumbs into your bare hands and tossed them into the trash, you button your daughter into her...
The cobweb-fine curtains blow in the wind, a storm gathers, the men work in the fields, the cat spits out its milk, and I knead, knead, knead the dough on the board, eight loaves already made, another proving, but still I knead, knead, knead the dough, my hair, tied...
Of these 42 stories, judge Peter Orner will choose 20 for inclusion in the next anthology! At My Job I Work the Robotic Arms A Corridor Full of Them Unfinished Equations Maybe in Moline The Cloud Lab Maid in America Brain, Brian Patrons Launch Day Conditions: 1986...