I prepare my tools for the excavation. Placing the suspect object onto a sterilized operating surface and unpackaging fresh picks and scalpels. It is 4.3 x 7 x 1.2 inches. A small rectangular stack of papers bound together. With…
And I’m an ALCOHOLIC.
My parents, they had flaws. I was the kid left waiting at school, watching all the other kids’ parents pick them up on time while I got BLISTERS from squeezing the chain-link fence so hard, only to become someone else’s RESPONSIBILITY…
Our hotel in Rome is a former monastery, darkly shadowed, stone. There is no elevator. He hauls both of our suitcases up three flights of stairs. I wait for him at the top. His muscles flex, his forehead creases.…
By Gabriel Brownstein • For years, I’ve assigned Joan Didion’s essay “Why I Write” to my fiction writing workshops. For me, as a short story writer, there are two crucial sentences in the essay. Didion precedes these sentences with…
The bed pulling away from the wall makes a sound like (the front door opening downstairs) the unfolding of a hinge, that sharp metal groan as the legs drag across the wood. It’s the only way to get to…
By J.A. Tyler • Other people’s diaries. Strangers. Their words inked across aged paper. Where did it come from? How did it get here? Who owned it, who read it? Hunt on eBay and one could be headed your…
There is in this dirty night a slam and a shout and there is Matthew yelling Pa Pa they got Owen Pa wake up Pa they got Owen! And before any of this there is Shin out of his…
Let it be entered into the record by fifteen-year-old Yael [Last Name Redacted] of New York, NY: The recent presentation, entitled “The Finest Little Girl in the World,” given by Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Letham at the Annual Conference for…
Invasive Species: a species that is non-native to an ecosystem and that is likely to cause harm to native species. The creature had been spotted again, and this time, accounts came from two unrelated individuals. The sightings had taken place…
Holly Willis: You are both a filmmaker and a fiction writer: how do those two very different vocations influence each other and in turn impact your work? Mary Kuryla: I started as an English major in college — though I…
