By Rachel Nevada Wood We are sitting in the kitchen when I ask her if she still loves me. As she answers, she begins to remove all of the things I don’t like from a paper container of fried rice —the peas, the carrots, the chicken...
By Vimla Sriram Her kitchen appears unused. No plantain peels huddled in the corner. No orphan mustard seeds – until she wanders in between medication to make adai for her American grandson.
Michelle Ross How easily the runner could have crushed it. The inchworm’s camouflage, which conceals it from predators, makes the inchworm vulnerable to the human jogging along neighborhood sidewalks, the human who does not intend the inchworm harm.
By Kevin Simmons When she opened and heaved and birthed our daughter onto our mattress, I knew we’d never be rid of that bed—the one my dad offered to us, newlywed and broke...
By William O’Sullivan
I was an only child my 15th summer—my brother away acting, one sister abroad, another home but waiting tables, dating, college-bound.
By Laurie Ann Doyle
The very least he owes me is a body. A thumb, a wrist bone, the big barrel of his chest. But there
my father sits: gray soot in a gold cube.
By Jennifer Anderson
I snuck down there evenings he worked at the sawmill, to the lath and concrete room where he gutted perch, tossing tails to the cat.
By Kimberly Tolson
My grandma kept her pocket paperback romance novels in the scary spare room on the second floor, directly to the right of the J-shaped staircase, the one we’d ride down on the old dishwasher box.
By Elizabeth Boquet
I call my mom once a year, on the day she died. Five times I have pulled up “Mom Home” in my contacts. Five times I have pressed the phone icon.
By Jennifer Handley
Concrete steps rise from pebbly cracked sidewalks, but go, absurdly, nowhere. Into the boards of a fence, or the sunless dirt beneath a low tree limb.
By Leonard Kress
In this morning’s backyard drama the tiny green bird has crashed into the glass of the sliding door
and lies feet up and claw-splayed on the brick patio.
By Stephen D. Gutierrez Our neighbor Lil looked like a TV Indian, all sunbaked and leathery. She wandered the streets brokenly, ill dressed, barely attuned.