Floodlights by Richie Smith
The floodlights we found under my father’s workbench. I didn’t want to cut chemistry for the fourth time in two weeks, but Lee was the boss. Lee was Freddie Mercury, and I was only Brian May playing a tennis…
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Water Baby by Amy Widmoyer Hanson
CHAPTER ONE — MIMI You might think I came to Africa as a humanitarian, dispensing medicine to babies so malnourished their delicate rib cages threatened to snap, rib after rib, in a glissando of tiny broken bones. You wouldn’t…
As the Lord Hangs Around Her Neck by Lauren Barbato
Notes on This Manuscript The following manuscript, printed here for the first time, came to light on the eve of November 4, 2024. While on a self-directed silent retreat at the Riverdale Center in the Hudson Valley, a Franciscan sister…
The Drowning Mothers by Aishatu Ado
CHAPTER ONE — INTERMENT The sky should hold its breath while we give you back to the ground. Instead, it breaks open, spilling a gray so heavy our heads bow without meaning to. Rain stripes the casket, beads along…
Hybrid Interview: Salma Ibrahim
Essay by Paul Chuks • As far as immigration stories go, Salutation Road is about as political as can be in the way that it anchors readers into the realities of immigrants in Britain and applicably the Western world.…
Interview: Sarah Yahm
There are few subjects that demand more courage like illness does; not just to endure it, but to write about it with clarity and truth. To write on illnesses is therefore to not only capture the slow, intimate undoing…
Ambiguity in the Speculative Impossible
By JB Andre • Not all speculative fiction is equally speculative. While much engages with the unreal (vampires, superpowers, ghosts), or the possibly real (future technologies, alternative timelines), a very small sliver of speculative fiction will try to capture something…
Nostalgia UTI by Trisha Dhar Malik
Packing up an old home into boxes. Heat of Bombay in May—impossible. Sweat everywhere. Sticky nostalgic and sad, the scene—not poetic or sexy. Sound of that stupid fan, an old creaky man. Over and over and useless like a…
Terminal Portraiture by Davin Faris
i. Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled…
Everybody Knows by Jaclyn Port
It’s summer and everybody knows that’s the best time for an adventure. We have to have an adventure because we are In Everyone’s Hair and There Are Too Many Damn Kids In This Damn House and It’s A Lovely…
