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Strange Effects on the Body
by Sophie Panzer My nosebleed starts seven days after my parents’ funeral. The virus takes them quickly, my mother right after my father, that first plague winter. I do not invite anyone to the cemetery with me except the rabbi. People offer to come anyway, but I refuse—it seems wrong for the living to risk…
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Two of Every Kind
By Lauren Osborn And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you. — Genesis 6:19 On the first day of the end of the world, she finds a spider in her kitchen. Or perhaps it’s not the end of the world, but…
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Raging at the Fruit
Tiffany Promise Death appears at my door with a fistful of roses. Plastic bags tug at her wrists, but she won’t let me see what’s inside. I imagine a heart-shaped box full of tiny bones, a ribbon of molted snakeskin, chocolate-covered somethings. “Cherry,” she growls, pushing me inside the house, hard against the hallway wall. My…
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Stories I Tell Myself
By Amanda Auchter Tomorrow I will dieif I eat this pear. If I eat this perfect almond, thisapricot. A whole bowl of fear at my fingertips—lips numbed, breath out of breath. Once,I boarded an airplane and began my ascentof panic. I begged my husband to ask the flightattendant to ask the pilot to turn the…
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I Never Claimed It Was a Human
by Clara Risser I have been walking around with a dead baby inside me for five weeks now. My body doesn’t know it’s dead. “Your pituitary gland is not getting the memo,” the midwife tells me, eyeing blood work that proves how confused my body is. I picture my pituitary gland as a young soldier…
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Vestige
By Cami DuMay You write what you need to. Once, when I was a kid, I saw a carcass in the woods,back behind my house. A deer collapsed in the humus,her skull still partly clothed in tawny fur, eyeless sockets,holes so black I felt myself pitching into their gravity. Here, a leg, and there, white…
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On Engagement
by Meredith MacLeod Davidson In the 1640s, two definitions of the verb engage branched from its etymology tree. The first: engage (v.) – “to attract and occupy the attention of”The second: engage (v.) – “to enter into combat or contest with” At nineteen, I had logins on many major image-hosting or sharing sites: Flickr, Imgur,…
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INCANTATION
by G.H. Plaag for Aiden Hale Tennessee rain is like the dewon a plum. whether you are clingingto the cliffs of Chattanooga or antiquingin Elizabethton, this holds true.today’s rain is the freezerburnon a Hungry-Man, ruinous and specific,shards in mashed potatoes. the rainfalls and reminds me where i amand what has happened here this year. Tennessee…
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My Mother & I Put Our Differences Aside to Poison Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fish Tacos
by Ivy Raff You mean you could poison anyone on earth& you didn’t choose me? Her mouth an O.She wasn’t wholly wrong: temptation it wasto flick a grain of cyanide salt at its center. We got bigger fish to fry, ma. She didn’tlaugh at the pun. I sprinkledthe poison into the batter. Adjusted my KN-95against…
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Afghan Girl
by Caroline Fleischauer Amid a sea of tents slips a White man holding a camera. It’s 1984 and the camera—a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105mm Ai-S F2.5 lens—is powerful enough to share grief between one side of the world and the other. The tent village sits across Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, near Peshawar. The…
