after Jenny Offill On the hour-long train ride to New York City, you read a book about a divorce that almost but doesn’t quite happen. Your boyfriend says he’s knocked out from miscellaneous paperwork and allergy headaches and his…
MAY Grandma Robbie led Anthem heart-center of the peaches, a quiet intersection between four groves, perfect as the holy cross. The trees weren’t much taller than Anthem. Tall as the big sister she never had. Growing up an only…
“The 2024 election will be all about Taiwan,” our boyfriend, Jeremy, says. We’ve turned off all the lights except the one over the stove in the attached kitchen, and now we’re getting high on the plaid sofa in the…
My wife wants to know what my new job is, the title, so I tell her what the woman at dispatch told me, that I’m a nonemergency medical driver, which means I’m there when the situation isn’t dire, when…
We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day. —Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on…
PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell darker…
And that’s when I know what I want to be. Not the cowboy, flailing all spaghetti in the afternoon sun. But the horse bucking and shaking that small man off his back. My father was out of work again.…
In every story we are precocious, fast, little mothers, little women living in questionable child bodies. Men stalk the straps of our training bras sliding off our shoulders. Our mothers scold us for getting ruined or dirty—always reminding us of…
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…
By Maggie Kast • When I’ve given a character my own thoughts on a subject close to my heart, I’ve heard critiques of my writing like, “Sounds authorial,” or, “Your character wouldn’t say that—those are your ideas.” Explication by…
