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Dry Toast Brings the Cavalry
by Jill Winsby-Fein My father is coming to dinner. Tyler is there at the stove in his silk kimono, charring bread on the flame. It is morning, spring, and the house is disheveled and peaceful. The walls are white in the kitchen but glow yellow. The dust ambulates midair. He hands me a piece of toast, and…
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Once Bitten
by Katie Cortese Because I once wanted to be a veterinarian (until bio lab), because I flirted with Buddhism (until I spork-speared a tick at Big Bend and felt only relief), because I genuinely love animals, especially dogs, especially floppy-eared, velvet-snouted, clumsy-pawed snugglers like my boyfriend Amit’s beagle mix—I’m the last person I’d expect to…
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The Tigers
by Sean Bernard All this time, we’d been together, and then suddenly we were told to be apart. We were we, an us, a gathering. All spring long we were a swarm of bees, bouncing through the plum blossoms; we caravanned as camels across the Sahara, we lounged on the front porch, a kindle of kittens.…
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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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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…
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I love you
by Yen Ha It bothers her when her daughter jokes about how she never says the words I love you, first because she doesn’t speak English with her daughter, but also because she’s told her daughter many times over that her own parents never said I love you, not once in the forty years of…
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Marie Antionette Awaits the Guillotine
by Aleyna Rentz We are going to get better. Our yoga mats and workbooks and whispered mantras are going to fit like plaster into our broken places. There are nine of us, all girls, all survivors of our own secret traumas, sitting in a semicircle at the front of the university chapel, a long room…
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Small Rodents and Other Unwanted Things
by Heather Debel At night, we hear mice scratching in the walls, soft like they are sharing a secret. We feel the mice moving around us, hear their nails scuff across the rafters. The house is alive—little vibrations, fingers on a waxed car, door hinges. Liz thinks they are playing with her, some game of…
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So You May Sleep Again
I had been embroidering dead people on pillowcases for seven years before I ran into any trouble. It was a long, quiet stretch of time, during which I sat in the front room of my house at a small table, colored embroidery floss hanging around me like a web, stitching in the light of the…
