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.
Two Funerals
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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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died
By Ashleigh Adams
“That June, I stole a red-and-black checkered flannel from my stepdad and frayed the hem with kitchen shears.”
don’t ask what any of this means
By Carla Bessa
Translated by Elton Uliana
“all I know is that I have to run. that’s the premise of my being-in-the-world: running, that’s how I’m programmed.”
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.”
Subjective Condition
By Rebecca Tiger
“A woman swims up to me in the clear blue-green Aegean. We agree that the water is beautiful.”
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…”
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. “
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.”
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.”
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.”
The Lemon Trees Don’t Care You’re Sexy (But I Do)
By Khouri L.F
“She asked where I was from. I said Chicago. She said, no, like really. I said Palestine.”
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.”
That Scene From Every Movie Where the Dead Person Gets Cremated
By Benjamin Drevlow
“When we spread my brother’s ashes in the apple orchard just below the barn, they never blew back in our face and made us sneeze…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Ash Wednesday
By Sarp Sozdinler
“I lift my mother’s urn high to show her the places she’d never seen inside the house when she was alive.”
The Carnival of Accidental Heroes
By Sarp Sozdinler
“Basking in a carnival that never folds its tents. In this vision, dogs wear monocles and deliver telegrams scented with lavender and loss.”
The Longest Day of the Year
By Jeff Harvey
“After watching The Gong Show, my younger sister and I enjoyed popsicles made from cherry Kool-Aid that were frozen in a plastic tray Mom received for hosting a Stanley Products home party where she spent twelve dollars on snacks and didn’t make any sales.”
The Abbreviated Kafka
By Ryan Griffith
“Kafka is born. You can trace his origins back to smoke, the stillness of staircases, the pallid sleep of bloodless dreamers.”
A fire of her own
By Pegah Ouji
“When Fatimah tugs at the peeling bark of a one-hundred-year-old eucalyptus tree, one jagged edge pierces her supple thumb, one drop of blood, red and round as Tehran’s setting sun streaking the sky red
Well Situated
By Angela Townsend
“I have not seen that man in a number of years. I wonder if he is still in the crawlspace of his bi-level, with the wind report in one hand and the edicts of AccuWeather in the other. All he wanted was a fair fight with the flukes of Barnegat Bay. You can fish in the rain.”
My Father Singing
By Jeff Friedman
“Most evenings, my father sang in his chair in the living room, even though he often didn’t know the words to the songs he was singing. He’d hum the melody or sing nonsense syllables to replace the words.”
English Teachers
By Sophia Carroll
“There was the one who always picked the same girl to be Juliet. He read for Romeo. Called her “statuesque.”
White Cold Winter
By Willow Campbell
“In the stillness of my apartment, I boil water to watch something move. I like bubbles when they grow into noises I can notice like the ghost of someone’s laugh.”