CREATIVE NONFICTION
The Pythagorean Theorem: Three Micros by Beth Gilstrap
The Pythagorean Theorem In a photo of her when she was eight months pregnant with me, my mother looks up at the camera. High sun. Her sweaty hair clinging to her jawline. A powder blue top swinging in the…
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Thieves by Beth Kephart
Couch You could call the color of the upholstery rust, but it was rust chasing a pattern. Blanket Harshly fibered, it was never quite white. Arrangement She couldn’t arrange herself after what they’d done to her. Then It started…
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Kept by Jane Marcellus
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
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Katya’s House by Shana Graham
In Katya’s house there are eight women who will never leave. They are splayed across a big, black, L-shaped couch in various states of beatific decline at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. They are arranged haphazardly: Some dozing…
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Like Water Flowing by April Bradley
You came and I was longing for you You cooled my heart burning with desire. — Sappho, fr. 48 The days run together now Monday is a Wednesday is a Saturday is a Thursday and most days I…
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Little Things I Hug Huge by Sudha Balagopal
The way Appa held the sponge-tipped brush of white shoe polish. The way he ran the snowy viscosity over my scuffed canvas shoes, on top of the laces, around the eyelets. The way he placed my shoes under the…
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Blackbird Dreams by Meg LeDuc
Content Warnings—mental illness, suicidal ideation Close to midnight, I approach the Michigan-Ohio border, headlights flashing around me like starry pinpricks in the vast, dark tunnel along southbound I-75. It’s November 2015—a cold, clear-heaven night—and I’m clocking ninety miles per…
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Choose Your Own Adventure For ’80s Kids by Paul Crenshaw
You are walking home from school. The year is 1983 and you’re 9 or 11 or 13, some awkward age when even the air hurts your thin skin. Maybe it’s the hole in the ozone the news is just…
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This Century, the Last by Kristine Langley Mahler
Everyone is coughing behind a mask. The papers warn that the only way to avoid the sweeping sickness is to limit contact, but kids are still playing together in the streets because October in Cloquet, Minnesota is rarely this…
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Gun Case by Charlie Geer
Later, after my uncle’s suicide, the gun cabinet would be moved into the attic, but in the early eighties it still stood in the upstairs hall, just outside my bedroom door. An unassuming wooden display case with twin glass-paned…
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