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
I crack time. Part the seam, step into gray-green gloom. I wait as eyes adjust, hear the seam flutter closed. Bookshelves line the corridor, extend into the past. Shelves crammed with books, spines to the wall, smelling of ozone and rose water. Hardcovers, paperbacks, trades, loose leaf. The past as hardcopy, minutes pressed against minutes, … Continue reading The Memory of a Memory by Marc A. Criley
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