Chanlee Luu a church on nearly every block: Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Evangelical. She doesn’t know the difference; what she does remember is the Bible quotes inserted—editing...
Phoebe Phelps I fell in love when I was twenty-nine and he was thirty-two, a respectable age difference. Preferable, actually, because they say men mature more slowly than women. And just in time...
Rebecca Weil He was there all night in his gray donkey self, standing beside the covered body of his friend while the snow fell. Coyotes yipped from the hills but stayed back. Deer came through, and...
Somi Jun 2024 Nonfiction Spring Contest Runner Up We are given the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. The teacher reads the story aloud to us, chapter by chapter, on the floor of a large...
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...
