Melissa Wiley Closer to Honey There were gold veins on her ceiling. If not gold, amber then, something resembling resin. They once were blue, the same as everyone else’s. Only so many years...
Belle Boggs My mother had marked the offending date on the calendar with a dark cloud and two jagged bolts of lightning. Raindrops fell from the eighth to the other days of the month—the...
Mandy Clark A boy named Todd is taking a shortcut through his grandmother’s yard one day in 1981. He is twelve years old, and he lives twelve miles down Pennsylvania’s Route 61 from where...
Randon Billings Noble wait|wāt| verb no obj. List I paced a room, a neighborhood Ate a party-sized bag of ripple chips Whispered “Heathcliff” in the dark Hit myself in the face with a...
Jill Christman Here is the so-called dead grandmother story the teacher told us not to write. Everybody has one. Once upon a time there was a shy, bookish, bespectacled girl with a larger...
Brian Doyle Thanks for your submission to the magazine. I’m honored that you thought to give us the chance to read it. It doesn’t quite fit here, though, thus this note, to say, as gently...
Anna Potter 1. At sixteen years old, I have “never been kissed,” a phrase I find politically and personally loathsome. I am six feet tall, capable of biking eighty miles a...
Ira Sukrungruang My father had a porno collection. Because I was alone most of the night—my parents worked the night shift—I was in the habit of snooping through their desks and drawers....
Anne Panning —from my mother: her measuring tape, golden and waxy, spiraled from storage in her sewing basket. It’s a gangly ten-footer, built for quilts and bridal veils; I wear it like a...
The word “benign” has several meanings. It can mean kindly or harmless. Or gentle – which is nice. I thought it also meant “sitting around doing nothing,” but this incorrect.
If you are...
