Keene Short Halfway up the hill, I smell it before I see it, before I hear the wasps and flies. Paint-stain fresh, mildew wine, an aftertaste of cherry bile. The smell pools where the path arcs and...
Debra Dean Because it’s 1964, birth is still an act of revelation. An x-ray has confirmed that our mother is carrying twins, but shows nothing else, not the babies’ genders or if they are forming...
Kayann Short What happened to him? And to his wife—meaning his ex-wife, so I’d heard. They’d lived on the lake road in a towering barn that had been in his family for generations, so much a...
Hope Henderson 1. I keep your memories, or shadows of your memories. Memories once removed. I remember, for instance, the woman you loved before me, the one I never met: her hair blond and damp in...
Sam Paul My mother is screaming and crying on the phone. Her voice shakes with rage. “You’d be so pretty if you’d fix your teeth,” she stammers. “But you don’t care about being...
Abigail Ham 2023 Spring Nonfiction Contest Winner I Fight and flight are the typical human reactions to threat, but they’re not the only possibilities. Children in general can’t fight or...
Julie Marie Wade Maybe it starts here: bright swatch of color behind the closet door, yellow as a fisherman’s slicker. The swatter, they called it, and you thought about it even when you weren’t...
Allison Field Bell My grandmother Ethel: I never met her. She died when my mother was twenty-one. Breast cancer that spread to the brain. She raised seven children. She was a naval officer in World...
Celia Cummiskey A young Roman woman walks along the bank of the river Tamesis. She is thinking perhaps of her parent’s home some hundreds of miles away from Londinium where she now lives, or of...
Brookes Moody While I might not have been in the exact emotional state of Lester Bangs, “nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind,” there was a time I too...
