Kenneth Jakubas I’m giving specific instructions in my will that I be buried with items from one year in my life. Being a nostalgic person, I chose the twentieth year. I wanted all of 2009 in...
Callie G. Mauldin You push the church’s gate door open and walk past the wild verbena, fuchsia palls of fire at your feet. Your heartbeat quickens. The church’s box-shaped form could be mistaken...
Faith Shearin 2022 Spring Fiction Contest Winner During the months after her husband, Max, died, Jane adhered to a self-imposed schedule. She had gotten this idea from a widow she’d met in her...
Anna Sheffer 2022 Spring Fiction Contest Runner Up We remember confirmation camp on summer mornings when the air smells like woodsmoke. At camp that year, every night ended with a campfire, and every...
James Sullivan The tree still had most of his needles, and although Carly had been at first against our adopting him, something forlorn and shaggy in his expression convinced her, as it had me, and...
Lauren Barbato I. Lisa meets Jenny the day after Christmas in the Burger King parking lot off Broadway. Jenny wears a black-and-gray checkered scarf with a braided fringe. Lisa recognizes the scarf...
Angela Yang 1. The man printed on the insecticide can wears oversized boots and taut muscles. He looks like he has seen all types of cruelty, grown disinterested, and so turned to benevolent killing....
Alma García We are deep, at twenty-seven thousand feet and counting on the east side of the Great Ridge, and we have been ruptured. We are tearing apart. We will remain calm. This is not our first...
Jared Green The box arrived during the period we would come to call Early Pandemic. We would speak of this time as though it were a distant geological era, a deep stratum, dense with meaning, in...
Blair Hurley Mostly, missing her old life before the baby isn’t a conscious thing. She’s too tired to have a thought like that, with actual words and sentences. It’s more a fuzzy sense of...