Photo Story: Good Form
By Andrea Lynn KoohiThe statues remind me of the dads I still mold with play-dough sometimes. How skilled I’ve become with the point of a toothpick, carving kind eyes and crescent moon smiles.
Photo Story: The Violinist
We had two winners to our December 2025 photo prompt: "Play" like by Emily Rivers and "The First Violinist Explains the Uses of Rosin" by Cheryl Snell.
Photo Story: Forecast: Severe Weather
Cheryl SnellLightning lashes the sky like a torturer furious at what he’s become.
Photo Story: When Jimmy Leaves Me Again
By Francine WitteI throw his orphaned clothes into the washer’s gaping mouthhole. I push back words it is wanting to say – oh but he is so beautiful and what about his soft-lip kiss.
Photo Story: Just a Piece of Junk
By Elena ZhangThere’s a tornado knocking on my door. It’s been knocking since two a.m. Since my father drove away in his car.
Book Review: Bare Ana and Other Stories
By Beret OlsenRobert Shapard’s short fictions barrel down pot-holed roads straight into the unexpected. In his new collection, Bare Ana and Other Stories, the fish are unbuttoned, tattoos start in utero, and it turns out Dad is made out of a burlap bag and a magic marker.
The Matchbox
By JR FennWhen I was a child I loved a little matchbox. It was made of cardboard, long and thin, small enough to disappear in a child’s palm. I carried it everywhere I went.
Subsidence
By Gary FinckeIt’s not the end of the world, fallout covering homeowners in the housing plan built over long-closed mines, firestorms and shock-waves making refugees of survivors.
Stranger Light
By Karris RaeMy husband is hoarding our lightbulbs. When this place was going to be our home, he replaced the greenish incandescent bulbs with ones like clean sunlight.
Listening to Savage Garden in Secret
By Charly ChowYou and me, both vicar's kids, ached for unnamable things. We sat on your bed, a little bit past fifteen, and waited for the soft click of your dad's study door so we could risk the slip of our favorite disc into your CD player.
True Story
By Sara LippmannTen days after their wedding, my grandfather took his new bride to America. His in-laws fumed. How could this dull man flee the country with their precious only child?
Custom Perfumes, Just for You!
By Nora Esme WagnerMy customers are young women, with bizarre requests. On their clavicle, a spritz of their baby’s sweet, milky scent. Camel Blues, “so I can smell them after I quit.”
Active Shooter Drill
By Emily RinkemaTo help them stay quiet, I teach my second graders to make lists in their heads. They tell me they list colors, their favorite foods, animals, numbers from 1-100.
Swimming Lessons
By Allison Har-zviWhat I remember of the 1996 blizzard: five years old in suburban New Jersey, I followed the neighbor kids out into deep snow. One girl declared we would have swimming lessons.
Photo Story: Another Earth
By Rachel CainMarcus finds a dandelion, its billowy head long gone. What remains is sticky and burnt. He makes a wish anyway.
Photo Story: From Here, It’s All the Same
By L. SovieroThe pilot tells his wife life is miniature in his work: small armies of toiletries, itty bitty sewing kits, baby bottles of booze. His wife teases that every time he comes home, he looks smaller too.
Alone, Together
Ryan HabermeyerTwo hours before the car went up in flames, my uncle opened the bedroom curtains. The bird in the tree seemed to call his name.
Photo Story: Day Dream, 1980 (after Andrew Wyeth)
Sarah GillettHelga Testorf looked at herself in the gallery. She remembered that day well. The bed, so close to the window that it almost touched the wall.
