Can you imagine naming a girl freedom? he asks me. Can you even know what that would do to her brain, starting when she was a baby, being someone who gets to go through life doing whatever the fuck she wants?
Featured Fiction
Saoirse
An Account of Vertebrates
by Mandira Pattnaik
In the event of being just matured, we could be jellyfish — pliable, buoyant, floral.
Sons
by Bodie Fox
A drop of water splashes on her face when I lift my foot, silt clinging to my sole. She gently cradles my heel in her hand as she wets a corner of the rag. A school of tadpoles swim by. A crooked grin breaks over his teeth. The rag tickles, but my stomach curls. Sons and I don’t look at each other while she works between my toes.
This is the part
by Francine Witte
where I believe that it was the goddamn fault of the night willow, that if it hadn’t been so blacked out like it was, bowed so brushy and low, you could have seen your way around it. Could have driven a clean road home like you do every night, except this one.
Parable of the Mother
by Lane Chasek
Her gift, which she discovered when she was sixteen, consists of looking at these pieces of garbage and watching them take the shape of a human being.
Awkward Little Creatures that Flail About, 1956
by John Brantingham
it’s early June twilight, the bats just now coming out and they stand awkwardly on the gravel of the driveway, crunching it back staring up at the little creatures that flail about until Henry asks Clyde what he wants, which is natural enough but said in a little punk tone that Clyde wants to slap out of his mouth
In the Kingdom of Toads & Bones
by Rick White
– CONTENT WARNING: Animal Abuse –
In the mornings — before school — there was always tea. China cups, whistling kettle, hot metal stove. Warm smell of butane, blackened matches, crunch of buttered things. Now there is only steam. It pools on every surface and spit-trickles down black windowpanes, shiny tears.
Every Kind of Woman
by Kristine Morgan
The first casting call was a genesis. I’m sure of it now. I walked into a warehouse on the southeast side of town.
Fountain of the Dying
by Austin Sanchez-Moran
On a whitewashed island in Greece, where the brass church bells chime out into the sea
every evening, there is a slender old woman in a red head scarf who yells out, “Soup! A scoop of
soup!” while banging her tin drum with a ladle and wandering the cobblestoned alleyways.
Out of Body
by Liza Olson
I am lying flat on the ground in a quiet living room in a quiet home in the kind of quiet suburb everyone’s at least driven through, if not lived in. I am breathing deeply, from my diaphragm, like the VHS instructed.
