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Film Still
By Amy DeBellis
I used to pin butterflies to corkboards: arresting flight, staying beauty. “At least you waited until they were dead,” a college boyfriend remarked, eyebrows raised. I mumbled something about Nabokov, but really the butterflies were just a symptom.
You Should Have Held Her
By Gina Martucci
Everyone knows the first seat on a plane is a throne. Ass space for miles. A footrest to ensure your feet are never dirtied by the floor. The sterility of the whites and grays of the trays, pillows, and headrests clinical and clean, but none of it makes you think about dying.
The Apple of My Eye
By Margaret Camille Berliant
Step One: Choose a large apple that’s firm, fleshy and plump.
Walter walked through the grove, the thinning sunlight filtered between the apple trees: Macintosh, Honeycrisp, Fuji, Gala.
Black Light
By Brigid M. Hughes
This kind of shit really isn’t allowed anymore but we’re loving it. She’s hammered and dancing in the middle of the dorm room, long brown hair, black eyeliner, one tit kinda hanging out, a perky pink nipple like the cherry on a sundae.
Everything Gone All At Once
By Christine H. Chen
It all began with the empty bucket in a corner of the living room that collected the occasional water dripping from the ceiling when Ah Ma was showering on a chair in the bathtub upstairs even though I had suggested that she simply took a bath
Letters to My Mailbox
By Keith Woodruff
Monday
dear 9535 hey, you look pretty badass out there. Weathering this weather. I am one of those people who can’t get warm in winter.
Sign Language
By Gary Fincke
My thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia and I drove out the strip tonight for dinner like we do every week on Wednesday when I have her.
A Princess From Another Land
By Pam Avoledo
A glass slipper is found in a closet, you:
a) Start to sing with the birds.The bluejay tells you it has traveled from a park in Canada. Have you been to Canada, it asks, and you say only once.
Retrograde
By Sarp Sozdinler
Mama got cancer. Bummer. I’m eleven, going on twelve. Making shit of my time. Time is still a friend to me but an enemy to my mother. It’s because I grew up too fast, she tells me, and I can’t tell if she’s joking. It’s because your sun is in Cancer.
Making Room
By Elizabeth Ohga
The pair of jeans that’s never fit, too wasteful to toss it even though you know you’ll never wear it, like all those friends you exchange thumbs and hearts with on social…
I Don’t Knock This Time
By Scott Bolendz
I shove open the front door, push past my dick-head brother-in-law. “I want my sister.”
Love and Light
By Lorette C. Luzajic
It was a chintzy dollar-store tiara, but this queen shone with inner beauty and galactic light.
The Fence is Always Hungry
By Claudia Monpere
We feed it raw chicken three times a day, but it is never enough. The fence is always changing.
Detention Seeds
Brandon McNeice
We had planned for this. In our pockets: sunflower, cosmos, zinnia, marigold. Milkweed fluff, Kiki said her grandmother called silk. The seeds came from wherever kids get things—bodega packets, porch planters, the torn corner of a springtime display.
Squirrel Fish
Ann Yuan
I meet my future husband on the eve of the Lunar New Year. A forty-seven-year-old Beijing native: a decent job, two apartments, recently divorced, and seeking a stepmother for his preteen son—my auntie posted only this much in the family WeChat group.
Girl Crushed – 1985
Phyllis Rittner
In the office kitchen, all lashes and cheekbones, gift-wrapped cozy in your cashmere sweater, peeling an orange like a surgeon, sectioning each sliver, the way you segment our time, a juicy burst here and there, little pink hearts dotting your calendar.
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.
