I’m just sitting down to write when my mother descends out of a Winston-blue cloud, nosy-necked, squinting. Her head glints with bobby pins, skinned-tight and sectioned, mapped out like a city block, an argument for redlining, a gerrymander, aspirational,…
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
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…
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
The concept of what is or what is not a weed is not precisely defined because it has both biological and sociological elements. Biologically, weeds are plants having the ability to colonize, inhabit and thrive in continually disturbed habitats,…
My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
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.…
The first time was an accident. She was slicing carrots, trying to keep them thin and angled, assaulted on her left by the blaring television in the living room, and on the right by her children squabbling in the…
By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
By Devon Halliday • When I worked as a literary agent assistant, one of my tasks was to read (or skim) the manuscripts that my boss had requested from promising, unagented authors to determine whether my boss should offer…
