Room 1 Which is pink or maybe sugar-white, and a cot and little fists stick out of a blanket and peachy cheeks and my mum bent over. The room is always quiet and milky and her little nails scratch…
Mitchie’s mechanical pencil shatters into a hundred billion trillion pieces. “Dewanda, behave!” the teacher screams at me. She don’t know us or our names or remember that Dewanda goes to a new school now. So we don’t call her…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
My first job was at a farmstand with a twenty-five-foot papier-mâché witch named Winnie towering over the parking lot. Eyes like a lizard’s with vaginal slit pupils and a boulder of a nose. She enchanted people. Drivers would pull…
Indiana, in our cold one-car garage, motes of dust falling sideways, the sunlight diffused by the snow covering the ground outside, and we watched Apá working the punching bag, his untaped fists flashing with each swing. Behind my brother…
Aboveground I was twelve years old when I last saw Blanca Esperanto. She lived at the end of the road. Their house was a brown, dry affair of rustling wood and dark leaves. She loved sitting on the ledge…
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…
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
1. I’m on the 7 train on my way to Manhattan from Queens. My AirPods blast Cardi B’s “I Like It” as I squeeze my way through the crowded car, not liking the pushing and the pulling as I…
Essay by Sam Dilling • Cara Blue Adams’s debut short story collection, You Never Get It Back, is a nuanced portrait of love, loss, and longing. The stories follow the life of Kate Bishop, the central character, from childhood,…
