SHORT STORIES
Kolorete by Alfred Luarca
On my grandmother’s tukador there was an Avon blush-on compact, a jar of Pond’s Vanishing Cream, a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder, an Ever Bilena lipstick in a gold tube, a saucer of hairpins, and a rosary whose beads…
A Christmas Carol: 2024 by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
I Jacob has been dead for years. Your partner, a seven-foot giant with a raucous laugh and freckled, sun-burned skin. The man who adored classical music and quoted Dickens with a British accent. Who bore, without a grudge, your…
Move Over by Lydia Weaver
It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo…
Udara Juice by Ada Nnadi
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
Inventory Week by Karen Multer
It’s Inventory Week at Baumgartner Plumbing Supply. Their parents are gone and, for five nights, won’t be home until morning. At nearly sixteen, Heidi has been told she is no longer a child and is therefore old enough to…
Celestial Bodies by Katherine Van Dis
Every month or so, a new one would show up in the lingerie department, having flown in by accident through the huge sliding glass doors in Housewares. Celine liked to keep an eye on them, willing them toward the exits…
Tungelquq Ellam Iinga: The Spirit at the End of Life by Naomi Klouda
Apa was my running coach. He told me, Get legs high in the air—tink of leaping caribou, tink of the high kick, tink of the spirit dancers floating off to the sky. I ran with all my might, lacking…
Give and Take by Abhijith Ravinutala
Rajesh considers himself a man of few exceptions, for he was raised as such. His morning routine requires a piping-hot filter coffee with boiled milk, served in a steel cup inside of a rimmed steel saucer. He then pours…
I Am a Dragon Joss Stick: An Essay by Yee Heng Yeh
Starting-starting I better tell the readers that this won’t be their typical primary school karangan, isn’t it? I know one, just because they see the title, sure they thinking they so clever, already know the whole story from Paragraph…
Hat Man Plays the Blues by Julian Riccobon
You saw him once on the E train, during a moment of drowsiness. The Hat Man, or—as your abuela used to call him—El Silbón. It was 4 a.m. and you’d just finished your graveyard shift at the 24/7 pharmacy.…