Megan J. Arlett 2024 Nonfiction Spring Contest Winner As a child during The Blitz, my grandfather clambered over the debris of collapsed houses in Gravesend, Kent. He hit capsules of dynamite with a...
Alison Granucci When out of the great cosmos of all creation a bird arrives as the new shape of your mother returning from the dead, tell me, what does it not have to teach about the nature...
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...
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...
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...
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...
