By Claudia Monpere
“The debris is mostly cleared, but this land is a black ulcer. I walk around my acres, dark skeletons of madrones, pines. I walk to the fairy ring of redwoods where my son and I made elf houses and at night cuddled in blankets drinking hot chocolate.”
By Jamy Bond
“When you take another man’s heart you take his history too: his longing, love and loss.”
By Luanne Castle
“And though you were hungry for him to change his mind, he didn’t because he never did. At the door, when he set down his attaché case to hug you goodbye, you cried out, “Daddy, ants!” And still he raised his briefcase and walked out that door.”
By L Mari Harris
“Practice smiling in the mirror. Run a comb through your hair, rub a little toothpaste along your gums. The table is set when the front door opens again. Answer of course when asked if you had a good day.”
By JWGoll
“I sanitize thirty-thousand-gallon stainless steel tanks with acid solution, then alkali, then steam. My colleagues say be careful, any one of them can eat the skin off a man’s face. My landlord and at least two of the women in the building look like they could do the same.
By L. Soviero
“The dead man remembers the warm sheets from the dryer in winter, the velvety softness of the fur behind his dog’s ear, the calluses in the wood floor against the ones on his feet.”
By Jace Brittain
“When pinball was illegal, there, still, still. 1970, 1971. All five of us juniors under Arts and Letters, various: Classics, Mathematics, History, History, Theology. Sundays, we’d slip across the border from South Bend, Indiana for a cold beer.”
By Pete Prokesch
“I never liked Ramon. I felt like he knew all the winners. And the lucky ones weren’t for me.”
By Louella Lester
“It’s your nature, you must go, is what I tell my Canada Goose when summer heat sends him north or winter winds pull him south.”
By Laton Carter
“Somebody is always settling the score. On the terrace, before and after dinner—drinks, the air rich with assignation.”
By Michael Tyler
“She used to skinny dip in the ocean, her swimsuit at water’s edge. I would keep my shorts on and earn her daily jibes.”
By Lorette C. Luzajic
“I did everything they told me, but still, I got smaller. And everything hurt, even the sunlight on my skin. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on in inside of me, how lonely it felt to know you were going to die when you were just a colt yourself.”
By Noah Leventhal
“you are drunk. everyone is loud. the man who smells like burning sage and leather has been following you around the party. you have been longing for a quiet place to fold into.”
By Tiff M. Z. Lee
“When the tide is low, it reminds me of our honeymoon—holding hands as we balance on rocky islands emerging from the sea, hair wavy with salt spray, feeling lucky to be here.”
By Brendan Todt
“Sarah takes her niece and nephew to the trampoline park and for thirty-six minutes mistakes another boy in a blue tee and shorts for her nephew, who suddenly appears behind her to ask for money for a slushie, which she gives him.”
By Angeline Schellenberg
“She keeps close to the courtyard window she came through, her ears tuned to nurses’ flats slapping down the hallway. Her brother’s shaky hand reaches across the tray for a water glass.”
By Annette Gulati
“She never sees her ailing mother. She only listens to her on the telephone, rattling on about the dialysis treatments, the trips to the emergency room, the stabbing pain in her abdomen. Likely the cancer.”
By Annette Gulati
“She’s six years old when she sees her cat dangling from her father’s hands in the open doorway of her bedroom, a circus act in her very own hallway.”
By Tara Isabel Zambrano
“we took off our PJs, and became the afternoon—our earlobes and neck, our limbs and nails turning pink from the syringe of the sun, asphalt gritting our feet, downstairs our mothers calling our names circled red with curses…”
By Nan Wigington
“History vanishes beneath our mausoleum’s gray rubble, the wedges of marble. No one knows anymore when Aunt Lydia was born, who primogenitor married, when Baby Thomas died.”
By Rob Yates
“She felt like the big, dead moon. There was a penumbra around her. It was all the things she couldn’t quite say to people, mixed with all the things she couldn’t quite think about herself.”
By Amy Marques
“We’re captive, forever separated from our before-lives, not free to leave, but free to learn from the forest we’d once set out to plunder.”
By Sarp Sozdinler
“I went into the woods as a man and came back as a tree. My arms are gnarly and twisting like a branch. My feet are root-like. My heart is bark.”
By Ani King
“My mom has never been one for much crying. Not that she never cried, she was a child once, and sometimes one of my aunts will get the sharp, gleeful look of a wronged sibling about to cash in on a little emotional revenge.”
By Huina Zheng
“Popo is relentless again. She calls Yong daily, asking why fate dealt her a son who forgets her sacrifices.”
By Libby Copa
“Reading the obituaries this morning I came across Jaclyn. I hadn’t thought of her much in fifty years, but maybe I think of her a little every day in some way, certainly I think of her in autumn.”
By JWGoll
“For months, whenever I am outside, he stares, trying to make me feel guilty. The damn dog doesn’t focus on anyone else and I don’t know what I’ve done to rate the attention, but he’s beginning to piss me off.”
By Coleman Bigelow
“Because both my wife and I are writers. Because when I’m thinking about a story, Ellie says I’m hard to reach. Because when my wife is on deadline, I’m the one who does the cooking, and it always turns out burnt.”
By Beth Sherman
“When the hummingbird hovers over the dead coneflower, Dylan stops twirling to get a better view. He’s made himself dizzy, staggering across our backyard, loopy from spinning, and we try to imagine how the tiny creature appears to him, its scarlet throat a blur, its beak vibrating shakily.”
By Curt Saltzman
“At times, I felt I was living with a stranger to see him huddled with his cronies, cocktail in hand, naked to the waist, a carnation lei hanging from his neck like a fallen halo, beneath the softly swaying lanterns, or choosing albums from the personal collection he rarely touched otherwise.”