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Stories
by Amy Williams Grandma pronounces it “rough,” Southern Midland like rough o’er our heads / when we was young / usta call us Oakie / shouts we did nothin wrong, din’t deserve that / I listen to the recording I took that day, sort photographs, greedy palms studying that rough, that house when she was…
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The Weight of Secret Wishes and Spoken Words
by S. Miriam Merces “If you get any bigger, your mother will have to sew feed sacks together. You’ll be too big for store clothes,” says my father on my right. His teeth scrape along his dinner fork. On my left, my mother pierces a lump of flesh in gravy. “Do you have to chew so quickly?…
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Tell Her
by Georgia Cloepfil He sent me a link to the trailer, and I watched it with headphones on during my flight from Portland to Los Angeles. I couldn’t understand a word of the video. I pressed mute in the bottom left corner of the screen and tried to improvise a dialogue. A divorced family, an…
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Still Life
by Sarah Fawn Montgomery She was not prepared for the violence. She did not consent. No one asked, simply forced her legs apart, inserted a finger. She was not wet; it pinched. Later, she would bleed. Seep red and open like a heart, a wound. She tried to look past the face above her to the…
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Our Deepest Sympathy
by Zachary F. Gerberick -For Tricia, her mother, and mine, and for Trinyan I My mother sits at the dining table where throughout my youth we’d spend long, unbending hours assembling jigsaw puzzles, first flipping the pieces right-side up, then, starting with the corners, constructing the frame, the two of us—piece by piece—giving shape to…
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Replaceable Parts
by Kim Ravold You are nine years old when you begin your piano lessons. You are twelve when you hear of the first successful grafting of a cybernetic arm on a human body, the innovative crossing of nerve endings and wires that can let a man feel the terrain of the earth on the sole…
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If Birds Can’t Survive
by Kaitlyn Teer Little Brown BirdsWhen my daughter is nine months old, she claps her hands together for the first time while watching bushtits forage in the bamboo that grows along our backyard fence. She stands on the sunroom’s faded sofa and looks out the window, absorbed in the action of birds flying across the…
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How High?
by Will Ejzak 1. When I was a kid, I always let go of balloons. At first, it was by accident: I was a spacey kid with shitty motor skills, and holding on tight to a balloon string was too much to ask of my fat little hands. But it wasn’t long before I started…
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The Profound Silence
by Alexandra Noe The car started turning up just after I’d been accepted and received my uniform, which differed from the one I’d worn before as a postulant. For ten months I’d been confined to a starched white, button-down shirt and a black, pleated wool skirt, longish, covering my knees. The stiffness chafed against my…
