Fiction from Lutivini Majanja
Photo: PublicDomainPictures Boots on the ground When Morgan Mugula’s father returned from his peacekeeping in Croatia, he brought him combat boots. Avunjas. All cool people own avunjas, which they lace up to their shins and stomp in everywhere. Morgan strode into school with his brand new avunjas, shy and dull as always, but bouncing because […]
Fiction from Rosie Garland and Meg Pokrass
Photo: Andrew Ridley Understanding bird migration Irruptive migration The frozen men, they eat me up. I drive to the market and they swarm like autumn wasps, droning how the trees are shivering; how they want my warm honey to take the bite out of the chill. They tell me about ladies who jet to Florida […]
Fiction from Sage Tyrtle
Photo: Jr Korpa Stella Is Smashed Stella is tipsy. At dusk she and Harry are listing down the sidewalk to a smaller, darker bar. She trips and Harry catches her arm. They both pitch forward, laughing. She twines her arms around Harry’s neck and brushes her lipsticked lips over his five o’clock shadow. Tickles his […]
Fiction from Gray Birchby
Photo: Jeremy Bishop Remembering the Ocean Chapter Eight: In which my father asks me to go into the ocean “No.” Chapter One: In which I go to the ocean for the first time There is sand and salt and shells and I love this place, so full of sunlight. I am four years old […]
Fiction from Michael Sasso
Photo: Clark Young Charlotte’s Quantum Ride On a summer day in 1989, Charlotte bafflingly avoids certain death and slices through the solid block of Time. The six-year-old is given a narrow glimpse of things immutable and true, present and ever-existing: No matter how you fool yourself into looking to the alleged past or the so-called […]
Fiction from Abbie Barker
Photo: Jack Hodges Alice, Some of the Time Sometimes Alice waits at the end of her driveway for the bus. Sometimes she stomps in the slush, water seeping through the cracks of her boots, and she spends the day in damp socks. Sometimes Alice takes too long picking through her hamper for something clean, or […]
Fiction from Olabisi Bello
Photo: Dan-Cristian Pădureț A Perfect Canvas We didn’t want her. No, we didn’t. We really didn’t. She’s an accident. A leftover. A babe dropped on the outskirts of our town with nothing but a swaddle to her name. Who would have wanted someone like that? We wanted to return her, But there was no one […]
Fiction from Carolyn Fagan
Photo: Adrienne Merritt Graveyard Girls The five friends were buried together. The sixth one couldn’t make it. She needed to be buried with her husband, her children—her family, she said. The five had sensed this long before the planning and planned accordingly when it came time. By the time the sixth friend needed to be […]
Fiction from Shalya Powell
Photo: Matt Hardy The Other Shore Lulma has a sealskin and Kayla has a drowning dress. The garments are both, for a time, lost. That is, until today. Lulma is looking through Kayla’s closet for clothes to borrow, pulling woolen flannel after woolen flannel off cheap plastic hangers until she comes across the dress. There […]
Fiction from Megan Driscoll
Photo: Andrew Seaman Modes of Reproduction Pacific Salmon are this funny thing called semelparous. It was a word Ellie taught me, years before she left. She’d sounded it out by the syllable: sem-el-par-ous. Sem like seminary, where she swore Brian Silver was bound to end up, el like Ellie, what she’d called herself since deciding […]
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