SHORT STORIES
The Seared Chicken
by Barlow Crassmont
I barely done a set of curls before guard Rawlins pulls me off.
Warden wants to see you he says warden I say but it wasn’t me that done JayJay last week he had it coming with the Wasps but he waves his hand no no he’s got a proposition for ya
The Mother and the Whore
by Sarah Bess Jaffe
He invited me to sit down, but I told him I couldn’t stay long because I was on my way to meet my new boyfriend for a four-hour French film. My second ex-husband asked why and I just blinked at him. Because Ralph and I are together now, I told him, and my second ex-husband said no, he meant why would a film ever need to be that long, and I told him it was so that couples who aren’t doing so well could go out on the town without having to talk much and still want to have sex when they got home.
The Hanged Woman
by Blair Nishkian
Eva Thorne had been pronounced well by multiple psychotherapists a decade before. But old habits had a way of dying hard.
On Spanish Novels
by Max Blue
And I began to wonder—as I still wonder—was I living in the book or was the book living in me?
After Ilium
by D. W. White
It was impossible, to keep up with it all. The water was over her chest, her arms, her neck. It was much colder than she’d been promised. It was not at all what she’d been promised.
The Easter Bunny Effect
by Richard Weems
I told Jake how I had been blowing off support payments so Marjorie would know she had no control over my life anymore. She threatened to keep Trudy from me altogether, so I left her long, angry messages: “Pick up, damn it, pick up for Christ’s sake, damn it, pick up the damn phone.” Trudy was four, and for almost half of her life I had been little more than an occasional babysitter who cut her pizza into thumb-thick rectangles.
The Most Important of the Unimportant Things
by Henry Stevens
She learns the cosmological significance of soccer on their third date.
From Rubble
by Rebecca Pyle
I hate pale blue flowered prints; I hate elaborate handbags; I hate dresses worn once and shoes which hurt the feet. I do like to hear stories read, or poetry: I like to hear people admitting things, painful, wishful, or glorious or doomed.
heirloom tomatoes
by jamilla vandyke-bailey
Mama?
Yes, Ava?
C-can we talk?
Ain’t that what we doing now?
Yes, but Mama. I mean talk talk.
Candy Hearts
by Nadia Djamila
“The Agency’s had a big month. We’ve purchased the condo next door, and the one across the hall, and actually almost all of the units on this floor.”
Noor, slicing cheese and fruit, paused.
“I didn’t know the O’Malley’s were selling.”
“They weren’t,” Isla said, flashing her one-hundred-percent veneer smile. “But our offer was absurd. They couldn’t say no.”
Careless People
by Emily Zasada
But now here I was, and there was the ocean, a matter of a few feet away, and I was being forced to admit that at least some of the things I’d secretly believed were lies were actually true. Every time a wave hit one of the windows, I tried not to scream.