What You Know by Heather Aronson
When someone yells “Boom!” on a sailboat, you are about to get hit by a bar at the base of the sail, unless you duck. “Hard alee” also means something like “duck,” but to the side. You never remember…
Tag: POV
Girls, Monsters by Jaquira Díaz
When we were twelve, we taught ourselves to fly. —John Murillo, from “Renegades of Funk” All of us girls, now women. —T Kira Madden, from “The Feels of Love” That winter, we watched New York Undercover on group phone calls,…
Empathy as Craft: James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
By Gerry Stanek • James Baldwin finds a unique way to interiority in “Sonny’s Blues,” which was first published in 1957. I say unique, because I’m not sure there’s another story like this; a character’s thoughts and perceptions are…
How to Return Your Child to School by Hillary Smith
He’ll want the Moana one with zippers like cresting waves and straps that glisten blue plastic glitz. He’ll cry that Michelle Naylor’s mom let her buy that one in purple. You’ve only met Michelle Naylor’s mom once, at family…
Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson
We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold…
Point of View Amplifies Theme in Zadie Smith’s “Crazy They Call Me”
By Candace Walsh • In Zadie Smith’s short story “Crazy They Call Me,” the author makes the unconventional choice to present Billie Holiday as a second-person-singular narrator. This strikes me as a literary high-wire act, plausibly the result of…
Take Me to Your Leader by Amy Stuber
There are funnel cakes. There are deep-fried Kit Kats. There are even deep-fried sticks of butter. Sam’s feet sink into the mud that’s covered with straw because it rained ten inches in forty-eight hours and it’s probably going to…
After Dinner / Girls in the Woods by Jacqueline Doyle
After Dinner A woman sits at a kitchen table, sipping chamomile tea and reading a book. The dishes have been rinsed, the counters and sink cleared, the dishwasher hums. Outside the window over the sink, the night is…
Five A.M. Ravens by Natalie Teal McAllister
Once you could sleep. At five a.m. the ravens are a collective of voices, neighbors in the apartment next door. You wake to their arguments or their lovemaking or their overwrought drunken discussions but there is no wall to…
Being the Murdered Extra by Cathy Ulrich
The thing about being the murdered extra is you set the plot in motion. You were a girl good at walking past cameras, background girl, corner-of-the-frame girl. Never-held-a-script girl, went-where-the-director-said girl. You’ll be found in an alley, it’s always…
