long sleeve shirts on hangers

Two Funerals

Toshiya Kamei

The phone call had come that morning. Etsuko’s sister-in-law, Akiko, her voice thin and stretched tight as a wire. “Kenji passed,” she’d said, no preamble, no softening.

macro shot photography of insect head

The Ants

Holly Lyn Walrath

“You lie in the grass and let ants crawl all over you. You lie so perfectly still that they start to think you’re just another part of the landscape—a rock, a log, a statue.”

white volvo semi truck on side of road

A Highway of Whispered Rain

By Victor D Sandiego

“All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence.”

people sitting on bench at a bus stop

A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame

By Sage Tyrtle

“My whole big self stumbles into a woman in a baseball hat who mutters fat bitch and I open my mouth to say I’m pregnant, as if she’s right to say it.”

photo of person s hand

We Were Just Girls

By Sarah Lynn Hurd

“We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter.”

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The Ants

The Ants

Holly Lyn Walrath

“You lie in the grass and let ants crawl all over you. You lie so perfectly still that they start to think you’re just another part of the landscape—a rock, a log, a statue.”

read more
We Were Just Girls

We Were Just Girls

By Sarah Lynn Hurd

“We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter.”

read more
We’re All Bananas

We’re All Bananas

By Chelsea Stickle

“After my mother’s skin cancer diagnosis, I was bullied by my older sister Sally into scheduling a ‘skin test,’ which is what they call it when you strip in a cold room and show a stranger every part of your body.”

read more
The Things You Will Do

The Things You Will Do

By Andrea Marcusa

“You will see your mother’s number calling and a strange cardboard voice will strike your ear with She’s passed, and you’ll hang onto your mind, save it from falling into dead air, fingers squeezing the life out of the phone…”

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Libation

Libation

By Matthew Jakubowski

“I later learned people had a lot of opinions about the kind of people we were, and our so-called lifestyles, a word they thought was so vaguely clever. “

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Sparrowhawk

Sparrowhawk

By Karen Schauber

“I ram down hard on the pedal driving the blue metallic mustang around the bend, careening headlong into a future without You. A year of joust and weave, submerge and abandon.”

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Your Body Is a Wolf

Your Body Is a Wolf

By Mathieu Parsy

“It starts with a tearing—quiet at first, like silk splitting in the dark—and then the howl builds in your spine, in your teeth, in the wet hinge of your jaw.”

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My Friend, the Heron

My Friend, the Heron

By Sophie Isham

“We stare at each other. Both have long limbs; both find pleasure near the shore of the lake. A few turtles on a log soak in the sunlight between us. I admire her balance, how she can hold herself up on just one leg. She’s beautiful.”

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A Weekly Arrangement

A Weekly Arrangement

By Mizuki Yamagen

“I know your order by scent before I see you—lilies, always lilies, that quiet kind of white, the kind used for altars, for memorials, for weddings when people still believed in vows holding through worse.”

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Today at the Zoo

Today at the Zoo

By Benjamin Drevlow

“Today at the zoo, someone has posted a video of a polar bear playing with a cow out swimming.”

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Anthem

Anthem

By Brett Biebel

“Sometimes, I read the news, which is always a fucking mistake, because that day I saw something about federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana.”

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Chalk Talk

Chalk Talk

By Marcus Silcock

“The detective scans the tree. Jacaranda sticks to her sandals. Yes, you guessed it. It’s that time. The time of flowers. The fiesta of flowers.”

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I Don’t Like Anybody

I Don’t Like Anybody

By Kathryn Kulpa

“It’s August, Saturday, and we’re tired of summer. Watching Creature Double Feature on Channel 56. Me and Danny and Angie.”

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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