Category: Fiction

  • Mon Petit Chou

    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…

  • Boy Story

    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.…

  • Revision

    by Brenna Lemieux       There was no knock, or if there was I didn’t hear it. Just the front door opening, that sigh of pressure exchange. Had I drifted off? Hard to say. Max had conked out in the toddler bed beside me, finally. A difficult day: Pat at a gig, and the news I couldn’t…

  • The Boy

    By Franz Jørgen Neumann       Martin is smitten the first time he sees the woman with the sexy nose. Neither pixie nor Roman, Jenny’s nose is longer than most, with comely nostrils. He tries not to stare as he takes the key she offers him. He thanks her for the bag of warm rolls, then carries…

  • A Better Man

    by Anthony Abboreno       Claudette and Adam stood outside their RV, staring at the fish Adam had caught. Claudette hadn’t realized anything that huge grew in the Mississippi. It was the size of a Saint Bernard, its flesh gouged with scars like trails on an old mountain. Now, it lay in an inflatable wading pool decorated…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Dream Men

    by Rebecca Bernard       In my dreams, the boys love me. Our hands furious against one another’s sides. Often, there’s little fruition, only build up. Usually, I’m still married, but I’ve discovered a loophole that allows for each fleeting tryst, guilt-free. A sundae with whipped cream and two cherries.      I call them boys, but they’re men, of…

  • Umunna

    by Tobenna Nwosu       Pitchforked mermaids and seahorses ripple in Ezinne’s blouse as she ambles to the grove. I trail her, my legs thinning and bending at improbable angles. Her pillar skirt throws off the sinking light strand by strand. Ivory disks tug her earlobes into corkscrews. Pines unfurl from us, the forest bed a skull…