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The Hill

By Hannah Marshall
I never learned to flatter, to dove like a wisp of white grace, instead challenging boys to footraces and tackling them into grass stains...

Photo Story: Now, We’ll Hold Her Forever

By Lauren Kardos
I cup you in my palm, brushing your curls with my thumbnail. The ringlets, once soda-can width, now spiral like tiny quinoa germs.

The Weight of Things

By Audrey Alt
Every Friday, she’s on time to pick up her grandfather, who teases, “Punctuality is your best quality.”

Wild Thing

By Karen Crawford
Mother empties Father’s pockets and confiscates his phone. Dollar bills unfurl. Pills scatter like candy across the floor.

Photo Story: The Dare

By Joanna Theiss
Blister heat, sunstroke heat. Melted tar, fried egg heat. T-shirt stuck to the small of my back heat, bunched wet and sour under my armpits heat.

Book Review: They Kept Running

By Beret Olsen
Michelle Ross’s latest collection of flash fiction, They Kept Running, is the 2022 winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction. It’s also a bruise of a book, bleeding beneath its tender skin, painful and strangely beautiful.

Wait

By Alisa Williams
In the bare branches of the hedge outside my window sits a cardinal, his handsome red coat fluffed against the wind and flakes of snow that drift from a clouded sky.

John Lennon’s Ghost

By James Burt
I once went out with someone whose bath was haunted by John Lennon’s ghost. The faint sound of songs he never got to finish came through the pipes.

The Years, The Years

By Diane Gottlieb
When the aides on the night shift drift off to sleep, residents jump out of bed. Tiptoe down hallways to the recreation room. First one in hits the lights.

October Again

By Beth Sherman
Bark peels off the maples. Leaves wither and die, everyone says how beautiful. Sedum turning a muddy green, like rotten asparagus.

Taste Me and You Die

By Chelsea Stickle
In the natural world, yellow and black together mean danger. I’m striped like a bumblebee for the Halloween party...

Inheritance

By Keith J. Powell
I think of my father taking me to see Batman opening night. Teaching me poker at the cabin.

Clutch

By Mikki Aronoff
The way I remember it, your dad was dying, not mine, his purple-blotched feet peeking out the edge of the hospice bed, its cold rails raised against a fall.

Photo Story: Taco Truck

By Linda Grierson-Irish
Dad’s latest between-jobs hobby was circling ads with orange highlighter. Imagine, love! An RV! Airstream? Converted bus?

Photo Story: On Autoimmune Disease

By Lauren Voeltz
I read a quote that an overweight woman’s shirt said Guess, and Arnold Schwartzenegger answered, thyroid problem and I think of this when I pop Levothyroxine each morning...

My Lithuanian Holocaust Survivor Grandmother—

By Tamara MC
BEFORE: Hot water burbled in samovars. You strolled cobblestone streets, clicking your heels. DURING: You sipped grass soup.

Freckle Inventory

By Anslee Wolfe
Freckles scatter across his face, neck, arms. They hide beneath clothing. A large one dots his ear. Five pepper his cheek.

When your son, who hates everything, who even hates playing sports,

By Amy R. Martin
... asks to play Ultimate Frisbee, you drive him—begrudgingly—to practice. The field is green, squelchy from morning rain. The sky like a Dutch cloud painting.