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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…
