Category: Fiction

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…

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…

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…

by Drew Nelles OUT OF THE BOTTLE      “You know I’ve never been catcalled?” Asuka said. “Walking down the street or whatever, past a construction site—never.”      “I saw the strangest thing today,” I said. “I walked by a man holding an entire peeled banana in his hand. He was talking on the phone and holding a peeled banana.…

by Maggie Slater       Dylan Brooks was a shower connoisseur. After thirteen years in the medical field, Dylan realized he hated his job, hated the system, and wanted more than anything to do something he enjoyed. Dylan loved taking showers. So he quit, moved to a smaller apartment in a cheaper part of town, and set…

by Chantelle Chiwetalu They both watch the bead of blood crawl down her left leg. This is the fourth month, the wife says. This is the fourth month, the husband says. If I don’t find the solution to our problems, call me bastard, the wife says. I will never call you bastard, the husband says…

by Ryan Pollard       It was midevening when the two friends ordered food at the bar. Charlie, the smaller one, glanced around the place. “Pretty dead todight, huh?”      The bigger one, Jeremy, grasped his mug of Bud Light like a barbell, his thick fingers wedged under the handle as though locked in place. He sipped through the…

by Dana Blatte       Lina first tasted moonlight when she was small enough to fit in her mother’s palm like a present. She had been born the size of a pinky nail, and as rounded and peach-pink as one too. To her family, this was no surprise; Lina’s aunt had emerged folded like an origami swan,…

by Tina Silver In 1982, Markham, Ontario, was a populous but irrelevant Toronto satellite, straddling the line between rural and suburban. At my high school, every student was white, depressed to some degree, and trying to act older. If you were sixteen—and I was—you were more often asked, “Where do you work?” than, “Are you…

by Spencer Wise Mark Bergman was standing to the right of the bema, which faced Zack Stein’s good side according to his mother. Mark didn’t have the heart to break it to Susan that at thirteen every side was awful—but particularly here, beneath the windows of Temple Emmanuel, where the backlight washed him out. The…