The week before the spring festival, when some of us village girls were sixteen, the age ripe for the river god, my mother crawled into my bed one night, wrapped her arms tightly around my chest, and whispered, “Ingrid, if the god should pick you above the others, imagine all the honey and fish the … Continue reading All the Ugly Things by Brigitte N. McCray
I filter out onto the shining steel streets with the rest of the Machina. They glide around and across each other in a hundred different directions, with only millimeters of clearance between them. Their motion is mathematical—no space goes wasted. I don’t glide. I can’t calculate the trajectories like they do, not anymore. I can’t … Continue reading The Tin Man by Kyle Kirrin
One Saturday night six months ago, my husband and I attended a party where we saw three women wearing the same dress. To save those present from embarrassment, I will not identify them by name, career, or family status, but instead describe the fateful three by their avocations: the Artist, the Athlete, and the Gardener. … Continue reading An Accidental Coven by Laura Blackwell
There’s a black hole inside me. Yesterday Oklahoma disappeared. The dry dusty fields stuck in my throat for a moment, my jaw unhinging and elongating to accommodate that wide rectangle of land. Part of Texas came with it. Lake Meredith and the Canadian River came last and cooled my sunburnt throat, as the salt skated … Continue reading The Girl Who Ate Galaxies by L’Erin Ogle
“It will be dark soon,” Tristán said. Arturo cleared his throat in response. He looked like he could be Tristán’s brother, but only in the way that the church ladies who welcomed the asylum-seeking families assumed everyone who arrived on that military bus were one big family tree, chopped down from a Central American war … Continue reading Refuge by Jack Caseros
Maria has been in the waiting room most of the day. She expected to be, and she brought a lunch with her. But it was only the leftover rice. She ate it hours ago. A screen on the far wall carries news of the vote, but Maria keeps her eyes out the window. She watches dotted lines … Continue reading Us, Them and the Future by David Beyt
Nancy fiddled nervously with the adjustable bed, raising and lowering her husband in it. Evan wore low-cut scrubs, and they tried to make jokes about his shaved chest, sharpie-lines grazing his ribs. “I paid a little extra so I could watch the procedure,” Nancy told Evan. Their insurance being what it was, Nancy was paying … Continue reading Replacement Parts by Michael Milne
All summer, the nights stayed brutally hot, ninety degrees at midnight. Esther would find me in the early evenings and we’d escape to cool places, air-conditioned movie theaters and basement galleries, then a nocturnal cafe on Telegraph Street where each table had its own electric fan. Esther would fold our straw wrappers into wrinkled sea … Continue reading A Nearly Beautiful Thing by Megan Arkenberg
The new planet had rolled out of a bottle of Advil that morning. The bottle had been opened and dropped, and a few of the Advil fell out and rolled under the dresser, and the planet,, with its fog and ocean, fell out, too, and rolled under the dresser. The bottle had been almost empty … Continue reading Planet Sea Fog by Julie A. Hersh
The Shadow Pantomimes must have drawn the ace of spades for me; that was how I ended up with the Whist Clowns of Old Frizzle pounding on my front door. I was in the shower at the time, my hair matted in suds of rosemary-mint shampoo. They jiggled the lock before the door creaked open. … Continue reading The Whist Clowns of Old Frizzle by Ivy Spadille