Perhaps you will find yourself in this situation, returning late at night to a university campus, deserted for the summer. This is where all of you visiting chemists are bunking during your one-week Biomolecular conference. You left both your wallet and cell phone in...
CoyoteThe house slept while I stayed up stretching, trying to fit my body into this world, knowingsomething ancient lives inside me and needs to ease into sleep. It worms its way through mybloodstream. A howl, released with a stretch to hide its strangeness. It is all...
My husband has this idea to marry a laundromat and a bowling alley. “A perfect pair,” he says. “Like us.” He’s an idiot. Who’d want that? “Think about it. Now they wait for free, but we could clean up.” I roll my eyes. “Maybe some video games or an air hockey table...
The girl grows overnight after her mother dies–two extra hands emerge from her back, like the Hindu goddess Durga. Her forehead is lashed with lines, her mother’s curses roll on the surface of her tongue. They fall and clog the drains. The girl’s extra hands work as a...
When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers. She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?” The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his...
I A cottonmouth swallows me when I am seven. It waits for me just outside my front door, stretched out along the walkway. When I step into the concrete space, it opens its mouth wide. Hemmed in by coquina walls and boxwood bushes, the only place to go is within the...
The men are dying. We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us. We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy...
There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear. He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in...
They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes. Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his...
We finally curated a shortlist of 41 stories, and they've been sent to judge, Tara Isabel Zambrano! It's out of our hands, and we can't wait to see which stories Tara chooses to include in the final 20 for the anthology! Wife 2.0 Veterans No Soap After the Rocket...
There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head. Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve...
Occasionally I walk here, when the weather permits. Today I spot a man watering his garden, a riot of grasses and Yarrow bushes colonized by bees, prairie flowers penned up with Zinnias. A tall and forbidding something with bulbous green knobs that attracts...