This story won second place in the MAYDAY 2024 Nonfiction Contest. I taught for 40 plus years. Forty, a biblical number; the Great Flood, Jesus’ time in the desert; his number of days on Earth after the stone was rolled back. Forty years, a God hour. I worked with teachers who taught the same year […]
The Retirement Clipboard and Notes, Hand-Written
Life, Death, Neighbors, Houses
by Mary Allen
This story was the runner-up in the MAYDAY 2024 Nonfiction Contest. Life, Death, Neighbors, Houses I’m sitting at my kitchen table talking to my friend Anne on Zoom when a cop car pulls up to the curb in front of my house. “The cops are here,” I say. “I hope I haven’t done anything wrong.” […]
Author in Progress
by Emma Wilkins
Author in Progress When Megan Tudehope decided, aged 40, to write her first novel, she started reading and watching anything and everything that might teach her how, and she noticed a common theme: people talking about how they’d wanted to be authors their whole lives, and had been writing since childhood; who had written their […]
Portraits of Uncle in Boxers
by Aaron Barreras
This story won first place at the MAYDAY 2024 Short Fiction Contest. I don’t know why I was chewing on my uncle’s arm, but I was. As a child I don’t know why I did a lot of things, so must find meaning from a memory handed down to my not-child-self: being small, and chewing […]
Mile High Chicago
by Patrick Miller
This story won second place at the MAYDAY 2024 Short Fiction Contest. The whole idea, philosophically at least, was for it to look out onto the rest of America, to build a Promethean tower of sorts – a beam with no terminus – just light – just America – god in a building, reaching up […]
Mirrors
by Sunshine Barbito
This story won third place at the MAYDAY 2024 Short Fiction Contest. I liked the people over at detox more because they wore blankets as capes slung over their shoulders and walked around like overused mop heads, dirty and dripping. One guy came through still speeding, still mind-running. “You wanna play a game?” he asked […]
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep: Doug Cockle Gruffs It Up As Geralt Again
by Caroline Cao
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Doug Cockle is an accomplished video game voice actor, but of all his work, he’s most famous for one gruff voice: the rugged Witcher Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher CD Projekt Red video games that act as sequels to Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher books. Although […]
Swimsuit Scraps
by Lizzie Lawson
Swimsuit Scraps The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I tanned in the sunny patch of grass behind the toolshed, where no one could see me from the house or yard. I had procured two hand-me-down bikinis from a friend, one white and one cerulean blue, and my mission was to bronze my […]
“6.9,” “6.1,” and “1.4”
by Chris Santiago
6.9 (Infantry Patrols: Attacking Houses) Darkness is hard to control it makes too much noise barking at Venus at churches and their corneas of fired glass better to let the lead fulfill its rapturous purpose 6.4 (Infantry Patrols: Feeding the Personnel) The cure for melancholy is a good tussle. The cure […]
Erasure Poetry as Anti-Imperialism: Chris Santiago Interviewed by Xander Gershberg
by Chris Santiago
In April of 2025, Milkweed Editions will release Chris Santiago’s highly anticipated second poetry collection Small Wars Manual, which Kaveh Akbar calls “a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.” Alongside MAYDAY’s feature of three poems included in the collection (“6.9,” […]
