By Addy Evenson
“Sourwood leaves shook in the Canterville wind. Gusts of humid air descended and rattled the chimes on the porches.”
Another Place
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Of the Lovers
By Addison Zeller
“They are first seen, despite the general darkness, close to the window, from which they draw back prudently, it is to be supposed, in a slow lateral glide along the surface of the far wall.”
Point of Comparison
By Addison Zeller
“Of the lawn, a photograph exists, dated more than a century ago.”
The Robinson-Barber Thesis
By Joyce Meggett
“I want you to understand, it’s nothing personal. I’m going to be completely silent—you should know that. I won’t write notes or gesture or draw pictures.”
Brother From Another
By Jaryd Porter
“Dad’s house had olive siding and a big porch with a swing on it—a loveseat that couldn’t support more than 350 lbs., i.e., less than one-half of me.”
Tiered Rejections
By Stephen Cicirelli
“His brother, a junior and an athlete in high school, was visiting campus. Wanting to show him a good time—and, perhaps, convince him to play soccer there—he bought weed and Banker’s Club to pregame.”
Winners
By Julia Meinwald
“It was in the Self-Help section of Barnes and Noble that April met Justin. She was holding Open Yourself to a Win, a title her over-eager roommate had recommended forcefully to her on more than one occasion.”
Storing Dinosaurs
By Dan Weaver
“After Carmen married Phillip I couldn’t chase her with my lizards no more since it scared Phillip and he would hide in the room and the one time it made it so that Carmen couldn’t drive Phillip to work and he was late and he didn’t want to tell his boss that Carmen was getting threatened with lizards.”
The End of My Sentence
By Roberto Ontiveros
“The deal I had with my people was that I could sleep in. I got up early those last days at the hotel, but not if I knew I had to get up.”
Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse
By Elisabeth Sheffield
“Welcome to Cate’s Upstate, a fashion forward boutique located in downtown Toddsville. The term ‘downtown’ is used lightly, of course—Toddsville is a one-stoplight village with one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two residents as of last Tuesday.”
Leeuwenhoek’s Lens
By Eric Williams
“From the deck of the trekschuit, I watched Rotterdam and its forest of ships’ masts shrink and recede, and with the sight of them went, blessedly, the smell of herring and the scream of gulls.”
from Cityscape with Sybarites
By Israel Bonilla
“The cellphone’s alarm woke me up to a bunch of pillows, a crumpled blanket, and the pungent smell of my armpits. I hadn’t registered Marina’s absence; her belongings were gone.”
The Temperance of Heretics
By Steve Barbaro
“The smokecrazed horizonface. Life beyond the life of each last belief-inebriated beach?”
Selected Dates (1998)
By Shawna Yang Ryan
“The Librarian asked to share a table with me at a crowded café where I was writing a paper. He balanced a wooden salad bowl in one hand and a library copy of Blood Meridian in the other.”
Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46
By Jerry Thompson
“Baby on the way… In this city of red eyes and milk-soaked men, the sky beneath Georgia Boulevard drips onto the disciples of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, clawing away the easy markings that cut the chase into tiny conversations behind the counter of TV repair shops lining the block beside me.”
Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground
By Mary Burger
“I came into possession of the apartment in the way these things typically happen, which is to say, someone died. I was the person deemed by the court, and, if she’d thought about it, perhaps also by her, to serve as her estate executor.”
The Blue Plastic Basin
By Eric T. Racher
“Lying just then on the bed well not bed really not thinking of anything thinking nothing of skin of the heaviness of days of dead starling or grackle not sure which not thinking of the matted old grey longhair who had placed it so lovingly on the welcome mat”
Tabs
By Austin Adams
“The revealed and ultimate truth began, as all things do, on the internet.
James, who’s changing his name to Rick, read that neuroscientists at Cal-Tech— ‘Western,’ Pam corrects.”
Xiaolongbao, My Love
By Karen An-hwei Lee
“As far as I can recall, my first dream in the plague of absentia was not about soup dumplings but simply about wastefulness. In a long waiting room, men and women in lab coats stood before a porcelain gullet, smooth as a swan’s throat.”
An Impasse
By Ian MacClayn
“When the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe.”
Clotheslines
By Khalil AbuSharekh
“In our household, clotheslines were a constant source of conflict. Sometimes, my mom asked me to fix them and make them more organized. Other times, they stirred up arguments with my father, leading him to take out his frustration on us, often ending in a beating.”
Requiem for the Golden City
By Molara Wood
“In the end, it was the mining belt that spat him out. But he hadn’t the tiniest intimation of this when he set out that evening, thinking only that he hated short-time.”
My Voice Will Not Be My Own
By Vincenzo della Malva
“As William was checking his guise in the mirror and putting on the finishing touches, he slipped a toothache candy down his throat. Oh, aren’t we all under the pressures of cares and sorrows?”
Bloodsport: Excerpt from Demons of Eminence
By Joshua Escobar
As the pandemic began, I switched to being a travel nurse. Like all healthcare workers, I received the vaccine early but only after a hoe trip to LA. It was almost unbearable without it.
When I Finally Eat the Cake
By Sumitra Singam
After the embryo transfer, Mel and I go to dinner with Aroha. Aroha orders
sake. Mel has some. Nurse Annie had said Mel should go home and rest.
The Sofa
By Jean-Luc Raharimanana
Translated by Tom Tulloh
A sofa floating in the fog. Inside, declining, I sink in sweet softness. 6 a.m. Everything’s fine. A head chopped off by a machete. Pre-recorded. Unfortunate. Reeking trousers on the dirty black flesh, green flies on red blood.
Envy
By Adelheid Duvanel
Translated by Tyler Schroeder
On the radio, they broadcast the description of my missing sister: wears a rainbow-print coat, green with a red sheen or red with a green sheen—asks every day if someone will build her a castle in the garden behind the house.
Overview Effect
By Tanya Žilinskas
I had met Minka once before, also at one of Aria and Hazel’s parties. Tim attended that previous get-together, a combination potluck and game of croquet held on a stretch of greenbelt along the man-made lake in our neighborhood.
Rate My Professor: Allen Ginsberg
By Arlene Tribbia
Professor Ginsberg seems to spend a lot of time at the beginning of class trying to get a poetry carpool going to Rocky Flats. Everyone—except for me—seems to know the reason for this mission. A weekend protest? A pop-up poetry vision quest? An off-campus meditation-on-the-landscape to open dormant horizons of our awareness?
EVPs Captured in the Old Fort
By Addison Zeller
She says: Some skies just hang up there like cracked ice.
She says: It’s not like before. I know who I am. I don’t have doubts. Even asleep, I know who I am. But I hear things. Close or way off. A train rushes by and I wonder: Is it in my head? Is it real?