FICTION
The Sand Nests by Emma Sloley
Only two days have passed since they were banished to the boat but already the summer’s inevitable fractiousness has made itself apparent. They know there is always this period of adjustment, this is their sixth year now under this…
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Buoyancy by Chloe N. Clark
I carry her in my fingertips when I’m far from home. Feeling the heat of her skin if I press thumb and index finger together hard enough. I can trick myself into her softness if I brush my thumb…
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Other Significant Others: A Glossary by Gauraa Shekhar
Ages 17–19 Aging English Rockstar Who Threatened to SueHe tells you about his daughter between mouthfuls of dragon rolls, dabbing the truffle off his upper lip scruff with the corner of a napkin. He lost her to cancer before…
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Crop Maze by Gary Fincke
In late August, his son began to insist aliens lived in the cornfields that stretched west from the outskirts of the town they lived in. Not playacting. Not childlike. They needed, his son solemnly said, to be ready for…
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The Night He Said I Love You by K.C. Mead-Brewer
Shelly died first. Some combination of tuberculosis and an ancient family curse. Then her ghost killed Dan, strangled him with his own bed-curtains. They both agreed to leave Good Boy alive—the game is Ghost Children, not Ghost Dogs. Shelly…
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Babushka by Kristen Loesch
The television gives off a low hum, like a bumblebee. Buzz. Buzz. I make the sound too, hoping she will turn away from the screen, but tonight my granddaughter is entranced by the grainy sight of hundreds, thousands of…
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As I Make My Crooked Way by Jules Hogan
I want to be a better person, so I hide my bad habits. When I lived alone, in a chilly, oceanside city, I let the evidence accumulate like flotsam around me. Now, I’m twenty-seven and I live in my…
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I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream by Chelsea Stickle
There is a town at the edge of things where women hold in their screams. They die young: high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, cancer. The girls watch their mothers and grandmothers and aunts play Ring Around the Rosie,…
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Ball by Siamak Vossoughi
This shape, he said to his niece as he tossed her the ball on the grass. This roundness, this perfection of throwing and catching, this can be the thing for a good long while. He did not tell her…
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Mother, Prey by Tara Isabel Zambrano
I was ten when I discovered I had a womb. It bloomed red. The same year I learned about space. Booster rockets to escape gravity, separated and lost forever. My mother bagged items in a grocery store, Mary, an…
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