John M. Kuhlman
“neph·ew \ʹne-(ͺ)fyü\ n. 1. A human skeleton that has been unearthed by a burrowing dog, often in an unexpected location, such as a vacant lot or beneath the soil of a neighbor’s yard.”
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Padre de Familia
John Rey Dave Aquino
“His father knelt and held his shoulders with both hands, looking at him from head to toe, his large hands growing heavy on Lyon’s shoulders. Uneasy under his father’s stare, Lyon observed his father in return.”
Ode to Zheka
Olga Krause
Translated by Grace Sewell
“Of course, poetry’s good for nothing. Rich people chew on it, but they’re already full. As for the rest of us, well, read a poem to your grumbling belly and see what good it does you!”
Oranges; Charcoal
Michele Kilmer
“We lost the house in May 1982. I hate that term; lost the house. I knew right where it was. Still do.”
My Wife Was Drunk at Hobby Lobby
James Miller
“I asked about Golden Books, for our child. Did she ever read the Hans Brinker one? We couldn’t remember where the death came in.”
Woodwork
James Miller
“Mitch makes each finger in the garage. He takes a block of cheap Home Depot pine and carves out the shape of pointing. I like to say they’re all index, homing for the Forms.”
The Teacher
James Miller
“The teacher woke up one morning and found a dead squirrel stinking up the flowerbed in his front yard.”
The Good Man
James Miller
“The good man wanted to spend quality time with the kid—his wife’s little brother.”
The Lion
Farhad Pirbal
Translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and Jiyar Homer
“That’s it then. This is my life now: always this cold and wretched wandering from this little room to the rooftop and from the rooftop back inside, like a prisoner.”
The First Ghost I Ever Saw Was
Marshall Moore
“A darkness had always surrounded our house. Locked boxes, empty rooms. Secrets hinted at, but never discussed. My sister (we’ll call her J.) and I were characters in our own ghost story as it played out in the modern manor house in the country-club suburbs.”
Buffalo
Siamak Vossoughi
“Look at me, he thought, an Iranian man in the middle of this America. Wandering through town after the thing is over and the battle lost.”
Iron Cloud
Suzana Stojanović
“Why didn’t you ever tell me to avoid some places?’
‘You wanted to meet the world.’”
Three Propositions of the White Wind
Luna Sicat-Cleto
Translated by Bernard Capinpin
“But what else could she do? That’s how it was. She was pregnant. Among all the other options, what was best for all would be to let go.”
Excerpt from Eva
Nara Vidal
Translated by Emyr Humphreys
“It was vitally important I calm my father down. I betrayed the dismay in my eyes as I announced, yet again, that my mother was dead and that I had come home to a house that was hers forever.”
The Woman in the Murder House
Darlene Eliot
“Octavia watched the onscreen car chase and shifted in her plastic chair. The chair, bolted to a desktop, was designed for wiry college students, not an eighty-two-year-old woman with abundant hips, long legs, and the impulse to gesture dramatically.”
The Golden Hops
Alberto Ortiz De Zarate
Translated by Whitni Battle
“With glazed eyes he stared fixedly at his glass mug, which looked so bright, and kept getting brighter as he watched his old yearnings and memories floating up to the surface in those minute amber bubbles, sometimes intense and sometimes colorless, just like his very existence.”
The Taco Robbers From Last Week
Steve Bargdill
“How awesome would it be to hit the Taco Bells in Columbus? Kick back on the couch with a couple tacos and drink Mountain Dew. We could have coasters to keep condensation off our coffee tables.”
Weatherman
Gillian Parrish
“When he wakes, he wakes in sweat, wakes in panic, turns to see if she’s in pain, if she wants water or his warm hand on her back, but she’s not there, and his heart falls into his stomach and he remembers.”
Shaky From Malnutrition
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
“MOM. YOU CAN’T FOLLOW ME AROUND.”
The Embassy
Khalil AbuSharekh
“I connected with her because, like her, I sit in our family grocery store every day. I found them to be like us: family, traditions, war, and now they are a strong country. Japanese people are exactly like us, but advanced.”
Out There
Daryll Delgado
“Gestures, words, details surface like a relief as the background is chiseled away so effectively as to reveal the unmistakable scene. My god, what were we thinking? “
Life Stories
Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall
“It will, I tell myself, do no one harm if I post something about R, if I insinuate a greater relationship than was really there. No one will call me out or call me false. Do we really think the dead aren’t watching?”
Auditions for Interference Theory
Emilee Prado
“If you input more information while the memory is fragile, you can imbed the old memory with something new.”
Solution
Linda Morales Caballero
Translated by Marko Miletich, PhD
“An appointment with this man has become a waiting game.”
Visitations
Caroline Fernelius
“On occasion, home-boundedness was almost frightening; she felt like an amphibian in a very tiny jar.”
Sister in Basement, Manny Again Elsewhere
Robert Lopez
“What’s happened between them is so complex it would be impossible for anyone to articulate it without the benefit of hindsight or omniscience.”
Bomarzo
Cecilia Pavón
Translated by Jacob Steinberg
“It wasn’t just conjecture or a form of emotional bribery. It was a sincere impulse. I’ll gift him everything and close the shop.”
Pseudokhristos
Kathleen Bryson
The little man in the machine blows a little horn and this will be my last sermon to the lot of you. Artificial intelligence drips through the computer that allows us to peer through the ages, and the little man caught inside blows toot toot.
Blue Eyes: An Excerpt from Another Voice
Gabriela Ruivo Trindade
Translated by Andrew McDougall
Fourth Voice (Maria Filomena)
Estremoz, 3 April 1974
Since my Zé went to war, things have been tough for me. A dizziness in my head I can barely stay on my feet with, an unbearable ringing in my ear.
Inheritances
Monica Macansantos
The night Andrew received his mother’s call, he was unbuttoning his shirt in front of his bathroom mirror, savoring the lazy, pleasant buzz that lingered in his head after a night of drinking and sauntering down the warm, noise-filled streets of Makati with friends who could drop everything at a moment’s notice to celebrate his good fortune with him on a Tuesday night.