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.
By Nicholas A. White Blood-red eyes, a forearm against the light, meetings and deadlines to attend. Mouths to feed, cars to buy, doctors to pay. And politics.
By Emma Bogdonoff Once you knew a boy and you loved him though you never said. Through so many years, you never said. It made you irreplaceable; who else could say so much with so few words?
By Pamela Painter
They want to know why some characters get long stories while they get Micro, Sudden, Flash. Why some characters get cities or towns, streets, homes with dog houses and dogs that howl in the night.
By Dinty W. Moore
My father was known throughout our neighborhood for his honey-rich tenor, his mastery of Irish-American songs, and Sinatra standards.
By Deborah Rocheleau
Why does everyone patronize mice? They’re always “unwanted guests,” or “the new resident.” Never “the prisoner on death row” or “the vessel for deadly diseases you would rather avoid.”
By Joseph Heathcott
In our wanderings about the city, we pass through each other. What is a human being, after all? Nine of every ten cells in our bodies are not human: bacteria, fungi, viruses, yeasts and symbiants.
By Andrea Spofford When my mother calls she talks about the succulents in her backyard, how she overflowed the pool because she forgot to turn off the water, my father's new job at Rainbird, how she's worried, at 57, she's too old for this.