*inspired by the photo “Candy Cigarette” by Sally Mann* Icy blue stare and perpetual pout. Blonde hair like a mini-Brigette Bardot. She’d be trouble, that one. Just like her mother. I don’t think I ever saw that child smile the entire summer she’d come to stay with...
Sometimes you read a single story by a writer, and you become a fan for life. This happened when I read Andrew's story "Hole" in his first collection, The Theory of Light and Matter. In my early writing days, Porter's stories were a fantastic way for me to transition...
We are the flowers who remember ice. We grew beside the glacier as it drew away, groaning. Raw stone lay broken, moss grew thick, then we could use it. That terrain longed for us—soil shallow, stone strong, and our roots twining deep even as the glacier still moved...
From the back porch, they swore, young parents, they had nothing to fear. The moment they’d thought they’d been waiting for: summer stars, sleeping toddler, river slapping the seawall at the bottom of the yard. Case numbers statewide dropping for weeks, an e-mail from...
Yung-Su brings a live dove, a Eurasian Collared with dust-brown wings and a black nape, holding it in both of his hands like a carton of eggs. Beats the hell out of Ever's "With Deepest Sympathy" card and my bouquet of stargazer lilies, stained pale pink inside,...
Of these 58 stories, 40 of them will be sent to judge Peter Orner. He will choose 20 for inclusion in the next anthology! At My Job I Work the Robotic Arms Bad Boy A Corridor Full of Them Unfinished Equations Maybe in Moline Night Manager The Cloud Lab Maid in America...
So I forget the tanks rolling over the wheat fields towards my house, and now I am on my ninth loaf. I knead the dough. Before he left, I kneaded my husband’s shoulders to loosen the knots. I will carry on — kneading, shaping, baking. At the open window, his cat...
You carry Grandma’s finger in a velvet purse. It’s your turn. Tess doesn’t have a chance of pocketing it now she’s wetting the bed again. Squeezing the smooth pelt, rolling your thumb over Grandma’s little bones, your breathing quells. In spelling tests, when big kids...
The flock scattered across the river at the sight of him, and he watched, drooling—a bony shadow in the reeds—as the big rams shielded their wives and tiny lambs, as yearlings offered wobbling elders their strong shoulders. The wolf had not eaten in a month, but he...
Trigonometry was Michaela’s least favorite subject. Her teacher, Mrs. Parveen, was at the front of the room, giving trigonometric functions her all; but the whole thing made Michaela sick! Sine, cosine, tangent. More like shitty, cringey, trash. At least she came by...
Tara Stillions Whitehead is a multi-genre writer whose powerful prose explores the fine line between fiction and truth. She regularly writes about addiction, abuse, and the underbelly of Hollywood, using personal history to explore memory and trauma via authentic,...
What you remember is how you had trouble believing it was Ohio, even southern Ohio, the way the river moved and swirled, rushing over rocks, and scuttling the overhanging brush clutching the bank, and the water legibly clear to the bottom in the shallower runs, grassy...