Mary Kate McGrath On the first day of senior year, I woke up to chanting. My mother sat cross-legged on a prayer rug in the kitchen. “Hello morning child,” she said, eyes closed. She now...
Jody Rae It’s a party hosted by people in my old neighborhood, so that should have been my first clue. I bring the girls, against my better judgment, but I want to see old faces, and it has...
This is my earliest memory. I was twenty-nine. The last waterslide park in northern California was closing at the end of the summer, and I felt I owed it to my childhood to take one last run. I...
Brendan Egan The pharmaceutical cocktail necessary for lethal injection being unavailable, the State had determined, pursuant to sentencing matrices, XXXXXXXXXXX should be executed by a firing squad...
Isabella Welch It was Sunday night, which, since childhood, was a night of painful malaise for Jon. It started in the morning this time, that tugging. Here you are, old, unwelcome friend, Jon...
Debbie Bateman This is not the first time Pauline’s tried to escape. At seventeen, she ran from her father, taking only what fit in the beat-up Dodge she’d paid for with her own cash. Her clothes...
Olivia Treynor Fourteen years old and my sister decides she is going to starve herself into the shape of something beautiful. She has not yet told me this is her plan, but from the way she studies...
Sasha Tandlich She attacks the shirt with a dull pair of scissors. These are the same scissors she uses for everything: opening packages, cutting green onions, trimming her bangs, holding against her...
Alyssa Quinn In the doctor’s office, a woman describes the shape of her pain. “There is a hard pillar inside of me,” she says. “Cylindrical. Metallic. It stretches from the pit of my...
Erica Plouffe Lazure I am a known heretic in these parts because I mow the lawn on Sundays. I can feel my neighbor’s eyes on my back on the Lord’s Day as I maneuver through my special, signature...
