Just as the Greeks hypothesised, my uterus traversed my whole body, and yet in an absence of hysteria, she squeezed herself calmly out from between my legs. I set her free and she rose like a glowing New Year’s lantern. Getting caught in bare branches, she...
We Love in Small Moments: a Collection on Love is the debut chapbook by Melissa Boles published by Emerge Literary Journal as part of their Magpies Series. In these 14 stories, Boles looks at many different aspects of love – the main two themes being romantic love and...
I’ve always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said. We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters. We all carry so many...
There was a man—there is always a man. There was the crush of gray wave. The cold bite of late fall. She’s been down here for so long, she can’t remember things she once would never have thought important enough to forget. What the ground feels like. What smoke...
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Fractured: What excites you about writing flash fiction/ Are there any limitations to the form? Montes: For me, flash is often about exploring life’s small moments, times when not much seems to be happening, and yet...everything is happening. And so I’m excited by the...
1. It’s always night when they wheel us girls in, gowned on gurneys. Underground. They pull their masks up and peer at our faces. Line us in rows along the dark gray walls. We must be sick. They must be healers. Lightbulbs swing from the ceiling. Somewhere down the...
We're proud to announce the 23 titles of our shortlist! The submissions we received were so thrilling, inventive, and affecting that we've had a hard time narrowing down the list! From this list, judge Kevin Brockmeier has chosen his final 3 winners and 2 honorable...
Years ago, his mother brought home a rabbit. “Make it fat, will you?” she asked him. The boy held the shivering rabbit in his arms, wrapped it in his coat, folded its body into his, feeling the weak tremble next to his heart. It was spotlessly white like fresh snow....
We're proud to announce the 57 titles of our longlist! The submissions we received were so thrilling, inventive, and affecting that we've had a hard time narrowing down the list! From this list, 20-25 stories will make it to the shortlist for judge Kevin Brockmeier to...
Every summer, my flower collection expands with my lungs. I gather them before the solstice, because my mother always told me to stock up for winter. She’s a hoarder and has a basement lined with silver cans, the labels old and worn, peeling off like epidermis. My...
The Children of Flash I don’t like novels told from the perspective of children - they make me uncomfortable. I used to think my distaste was for their naivete or the either overly-precocious or under-developed voice adults use when they’re trying to sound young. Now,...