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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.