By Suzanne Heagy

When the key slipped from Brandon’s fingers, he cursed his luck with a “Motherfucker.” He swung his shaggy head around, bloodshot eyes searching the floor. He needed to smoke. The damn key bounced when it hit.

By Aysegul Savas

Before I moved back to Istanbul to live with my mother, whose escalating illness was getting in the way of daily tasks, I lived with my boyfriend, a Canadian student of mathematics, in a small university town in New Hampshire.

By Heinz Insu Fenkl and Thé T. Nguyen

From the Eye Thief: A Graphic Novel-in-Progress.

By Rich Ives

I was having trouble remembering where I had parked the car, and then I was remembering how I had been thinking when I parked it that putting the baby in the baby seat was like parking the baby.

By Laurie Blauner

Iwas my hollow self, hands clutched around my arterial neck, squeezing spasmodically. I was tired of all those deadly little assignments. I was taking my time, taking too long for my children, who fervently believed I was already too old.

By Mary Burger

Prologue

Everybody readily accepted that no one had the same idea of ‘red.’ When different people looked, they saw different things. Colors were for when words couldn’t do the job. By extension this was true for everything that everybody looked at.

By Johnathan Harper

A boy hates the duck pond. The mallards are clustered at his feet. He is sitting on a bench and sobbing. In his hand a phone — a text. The ducks eye the phone, expecting the boy will shred tiny pieces of plastic off and throw them into the tepid waters.

By Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon

The commercials begin. A light bulb in black and white fills the screen. You hold one too, the subject and the object. Your face glistens and you say my name aloud again and again until you believe I am here, trapped in the bulb, and so I am.

By Misty Ellingburg

When he got back to the reservation Sophia was upstairs turning a trick in the master bedroom. He waited. Downstairs in the kitchen the countertops were three layers thick in crumbs stuck to grease and soda spills.

By Carlos Labbé
Translated by William Vanderhyden

Invocation

Words, wrongly directed, can cause you more harm than any enemy or one who wants you dead.

By Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Clumps of wet snow mat the black collar of my houndstooth coat. I clomp my red galoshes in front of the West Campus’s foyer. Gray slush splatters. It stains the coat’s white and black pattern.

By Fernando Vallejo
Translated by Laia García Sánchez & Robert Jackson

When they opened the door for him, he entered without saying hello, went upstairs, crossed the second floor, got to the room in the back, collapsed on the bed and fell into a coma. Like that, free of himself, at the edge of the abyss of death that he would fall over not long afterwards, he spent what I believe were his only days in peace since his long-ago youth.

By Rachel Nagelberg

Miley Cyrus sits cross-legged on the floor of her hotel bedroom, hands resting loosely in her lap, eyes shut to the pulsating exterior world. She is breathing in only with her nostrils, focusing intently on deeper work within.

By Steve Weiner

Rosenberry was a bed and breakfast bungalow where Highway 52 came to Wausau in central Wisconsin. It was owned by the late Judge Rosenberry, who engineered the five-day workweek.

By Michael Shou-Yung Shum

I prefer not to show the ocean how I feel deep down. I am very comfortable being close to boulders. Just when the sun starts to get close to me I find myself pulling away.

By Daniel J. Pizappi

The damage wasn’t visible from the street. Sitting on the cool grass, staring back at the house, you might not even know it had happened. This would prove frustrating for the photographers and camera crews.

By Kyle Hemmings

At night, the city could squeeze him, smother him in a dumb-box, make him believe that marionettes could come to life in mirrors. The city was 39 stories of dead moths with neon wings. The city was masked people trapped inside stucco. Or a basement apartment with a ceiling painted with stars.

By Eugene Lim

I went at the regular time to the karaoke bar to meet Muriel and Gus. The bar, which had several names but usually went by “Alibi,” took up the entire ninth floor of a hastily built structure amidst the dirty neon of one of Diaspora City’s seedier districts.

By Marianne Villanueva

The elephant’s hide was a beautiful, dark grey. It was a young female: little more than a baby. Zoo officials paid a small fortune to have it shipped from Thailand.

The captain in charge of the cargo had never before transported an exotic. But he was an excellent captain. The shipping line had absolute confidence in his abilities.

By Michael du Plessis

A Novel in Thirteen Chapters

I

The jeweler’s heart burns only for the icy brilliance of the gems he facets, while east and west eunuchs with the guile of serpents establish swelling bureaucracies almost certain to clog the arteries of empire. Since the village has fallen under a spell, the full moon never wanes and gallops each night across the sky in a coach of clouds.

By Kirsten Kaschock

“Forget the pitch.” The words woke with him. Had it been a ship dream? A dream of torches and townspeople? A baseball dream? He’d had them all. Dreaming was the place he did stuff. His bad hips were worse.

By Chris Yamashita

Here they were, staring at the smoldering, blackened smile of an extinguished house fire. Tendrils of smoke rose from the seething ground, ash swirled in the air, and Reid’s wife, Waverly, said, “I can’t believe this,” which was her new favorite thing to say. She couldn’t believe much of anything anymore — for instance, Reid having forgotten to buy carrots for the stir-fry last night.

By David Bajo

Prima X — Equisa — honors her cousin’s request and scatters his ashes over the caldera of Paricutín. The wind is perfect, swirling lightly around the volcano’s lip, taking him in a procession of dust devils down the inside slope and over the green lake at the bottom.

By Sven Hansen-Löve
Translated by Simon Rogghe

April was having a strange dream. She saw herself wandering through a vast hotel. The occupants had all cleared out due to some catastrophe or other. She explored the rooms, rummaged through people’s belongings and opened their suitcases one by one, looking for something specific… what, she couldn’t say.

By John Beckman

At the age of nine, in the year before my mother’s death, I had become exceedingly religious. My mother tutored me daily in catechism, and since my father and sister had never cared for religion (they spent their Sundays together at the beach), it became a sort of game between us — the litany, the Novenas, the Lives of the Saints.

By Racquel Goodison

ONE.

It is a dance she did every evening, but this time she hoped she would not be locked in the broken waltz, draped over its enduring grip, circling till dawn.

Midori Chen

Her first relationship is a Boy-Girl statistic — so much so that neither of them deserves a name, just Subject A and B, completely equal in anonymity. Subject A has black hair, wavy from frequent braids

Elise Glassman

Before Claudette and Gates even had time to sit down on the buttery
leather sofa or pour a drink from the glass pitcher filled with water
and lemon slices, Conor Volkman, Jr. came to the waiting room
to fetch them.

Matt Galletta

He held his wife’s hand as she lay on the exam table, her shirt
rolled up to her breasts. The obstetrician spread a nickel-sized
glob of jelly onto his wife’s stomach.