Chocolate Cake
By Jennifer WortmanMy dad’s student from the college, who’d come over for dinner, looked at me and said, “You can’t have any chocolate cake!” I was one. He thought he was making a pretty good joke.
How My Mother Posed Me
By Gary FinckeThe photographer instructs my mother to hide under the dark maroon blanket to hold her infant still. “It takes time and quiet for your darling to be perfect,” he says.
The Swedish Word for Joy
By Brett Ann StanciuI begged off 2000 Census training and rushed up the windowless stairs of the cheap-paneled church basement.
Teaching English in the Biology Lab
By Gary FinckeSea life charts are props for Melville, the mounted cat a visual aid for Poe. Leaves are displayed like a nod to Thoreau.
Photo Story: Warm and Alive
By Andrea DanielsA careful undertaker from Sheepshead Bay. We met via personal ad, his exactly three lines long. A tidy accounting of loneliness.
Dimensions of Human Behavior
Alexandra N. KontesShortly after we last spoke, you became a ghost, and I became a hermit.
Photo Story: 1974
By Riley AnnWe didn’t talk that summer. My father drowned out the silence with the news: Nixon, war, the World Series...
You play as a femme venom avatar & we never get past the character creation page
By Erin VachonWe’re mashing up faces in the RPG campaign on your game system, two boys sitting, joysticking experience points in a multifaceted digitizer...
False Stars
By Frances BadgettThe frozen ground, hard and cold, lumped under their blanket, dug into them. She followed his finger to the sky.
Photo Story: If I Could Buy Thoughts
By Amy MarquesI would give a penny to the student who sits in the back and looks down whenever they sense a question coming ...
Golden State
By Charles PrelleWe’re humming down the Pacific Coast Highway just north of San Francisco on our gap year in a rented real American cherry red 1993 Ford Mustang...
Photo Story: The Candy Store Thinks She’s an Ocean
By Linda Grierson-IrishShe’d glimpsed scenes from a documentary on a girl’s mobile screen. Now her syrupy exhalations smell brackish.
Timestruck
By Myna ChangThere’s a split second, after the ignition catches and the radio blasts out a loud loud song from high school, when time strikes...
Photo Story: Now, We’ll Hold Her Forever
By Lauren KardosI 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 AltEvery Friday, she’s on time to pick up her grandfather, who teases, “Punctuality is your best quality.”
Wild Thing
By Karen CrawfordMother empties Father’s pockets and confiscates his phone. Dollar bills unfurl. Pills scatter like candy across the floor.
Photo Story: The Dare
By Joanna TheissBlister 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.
