Category: Fiction

by Blair Hurley       Her great-grandmother, so she’s been told, lost many children. They were Kansas people, prairie people, who lived in a remote dust-battered town and worshiped in a bare whitewashed church, the singular steeple the tallest thing around for miles. They were Christian Scientists.      Going through her great-grandmother’s things in the hot attic of their…

by Becky Petterson       They meet in the middle at the park in their childhood neighborhood. The grass is yellow and shriveled, the leaves already curling toward their mortality. The two women embrace, the distance between them a living topography impossible to measure.      “You cut your hair,” Sarah says reaching forward, and Ruth fingers the blunt black…

by Brittany Micka-Foos Jamestown, Virginia, 2002       I pluck a tobacco beetle from the sticky underside of a leaf, hold it between my thumb and forefinger, and watch it writhe. This is my summer job. I am sixteen years old, and I am testing my powers.      We stand in a small plot simulacrum of a tobacco field.…

by William Kitcher       I have been asked by the editors of this fine and august magazine to write an introduction to my short story, “Brides Glue Component.” I’m very flattered to have received this request for two reasons. The first is that I have never been invited to do so before, and the second is…

by Paul Stinson       Kids aren’t stupid. They see everything. They’re full of questions, too. Not that we have too many answers.      I just say, “We’re going to have you feeling much better soon, sweetie. Trust me.”      The smallest ones sometimes get spooked around all the doctors and nurses. They get scared of all the equipment. It helps…

by Adam Greenberg When the front entrance falters, and shortly thereafter the back, naturally we MacGyver all manner of workarounds. The architect, bless him, runs around like Noah plugging holes in his ark. But when the windows pose a problem, and when even the chimney proves impassable, my wife and I go out of our…

by Angela Townsend       Harriet would not be satisfied until I went out onto my balcony. It would be better if I went to ground level, but she would compromise. She texted me five blurry pictures of the full moon.       “Go outside! Soak up this moon energy!”      If Harriet ran the electric company, no one would receive a…

by Dana Jean Rider       Tumbleweeds are significant safety hazards to cars and bodies alike on desert highways. They catch inside wheel wells when drivers speed over them—they mess up machinery, wrap their spiny limbs around tire axles. Large tumbleweeds can even break windshields when launched by another car’s spinning wheels.      You think they must also be…

by Meg Mullins When you are a cabbage and I am still your wife, I will drag my fingers across your first tender leaves and remember your skin. You will be intimate with the soil and the worms that live there, and I will find some comfort in that. There is magic happening in the…

by Jenny Fried       A story for you: two boys get on the train together, and they are not in love. The first boy is very tall, the other is less so. The short boy has bleached his eyebrows with lemon juice, the tall boy does not know yet how to buy clothes that fit him.…