Small. Brightly colored. Deadly to the touch.
We used to call it a fashion show but really it was an excuse to see each other without clothes on. Maybe for comparison’s sake or maybe because we were curious. Maybe for some other reasons. We were 6th grade girls dancing half-naked in… Continue Reading “We Used To by Lisa Muschinski”
The Velvet Room was a dark, dingy arcade underneath the city viaducts, where teenagers spent weekends, permeating with musk and lust. The Velvet Room was a landmark. It had been around for as long as most people could remember. No one knew who owned… Continue Reading “The Velvet Room by Wiebo Grobler”
No one noticed. They began with the old haunts: graveyards, derelict hospitals and battlefields. Places where there were easy pickings: ghosts who had been dead so long they had been forgotten, who spoke in ancient tongues and whose names had been lost. We didn’t… Continue Reading “When the Ghostcatchers First Came by Iona Rule”
Years back, Tyler dropped Jen off each night before his pizza delivery shift. The rutted dirt tracks cut between twin swamps. Lily pads and snapping turtles clustered along the banks. Cedars grew sparse, roots left to keep the road from washing out. Only one… Continue Reading “This is Not His Ghost Story by Corey Farrenkopf”
Everyone’s afraid of the woman. She died with her tiny daughter in the swimming pool. No: a man came and drowned her and now her ghost forever searches for her little girl. Or was it that she died pregnant, with a baby swimming inside… Continue Reading “The Shy Girl by Jan Stinchcomb”
Sister guides my hand, and the brush smears paint across canvas. Brother reads over my shoulder, whispers to linger on a paragraph before turning the page. We move from one house to another. Eight times now, and yet they follow. Their laughter echoes in… Continue Reading “My Siblings are the Birch by A.D. Sui”
I stood in line to pay for my cart of groceries exhausted from working at the pharmacy, sorting pills for people who need them, people who think they need them, and some looking to fix what is broken and beyond repair, and in line… Continue Reading “Farrago by Sabrina Hicks”
The baker’s mother teaches her how to score bread. She is not a baker yet. Her nose barely brushes the flour-dusted table, even when she stretches on her tip-tip-toes. Let me, her mother says and lifts the baker up onto her body, pillowed by… Continue Reading “The Breaking and the Baking by Avra Margariti”
My dearest erzi was four when the men from Beijing took him away. See how smoothly your child moves in the water, they said. He will serve our country well. Just like that, he was gone. In the place of his sweet laugh, a… Continue Reading “Grown by Lifan Chu”
It is the last day of summer vacation, which means the two friends have until tomorrow morning to annotate The Odyssey. They haven’t started reading it, except for the first few pages, which are like, really boring. The Odyssey isn’t one of those books… Continue Reading “Tell Me and Tell Me True by Anthony Varallo”