1. You sit for your interview at a cubicle inside a large warehouse. Your interviewer says you’d be a risky hire, as he’s looking to bring someone on with more relevant experience. However he’s open to hearing how your work recycling cheap clothing back to citizens of the Global South, working security at a sticky […]
Featured Nonfiction
Diva Plavalaguna Cuts Your Career Short
you hold me down
by Victoria Hood
You tell me that when I am seventeen we can take this public that when I’m seventeen the age difference won’t matter
Manifesting a Name
by Gerald Ewa
1 The detachment I felt towards my last name began when I was 13. I was newly admitted into Junior Secondary School. I sat somewhere in front of a classroom with cream-colored walls that peeled in flakes when touched, sardined between students whose faces wore radiant smiles tinged with anxiety. The class was filled with […]
May 1998
by Jeddie Sophronius
Don’t— I don’t remember if it rained that day. What I do remember was the smoke in the distance. No, not the sight of smoke, the smell, that piercing odor similar to the first few stages of decay, of rot—and maybe rot wasn’t so far off, maybe it was a corpse that burned. […]
What I Do and Do Not Say to the Girl on the Plane to Panama
by Kristi Ferguson
I notice them first during boarding. I don’t see her there, she’s camouflaged, just one of the flock. There is a cluster of them, too many women and girls together, all dressed in wine-colored gowns down to tennis-shoed ankles, with gray fleece jackets over their shoulders, tall black hats pinned to their heads. The […]
Amygdala
by Christian Chase Garner
I. I’m not afraid of getting old, carrying cancer-like clumps of yarrow, being stuck inside ever-thinning skin and eventually getting my ashes tossed to a winter wind in a buoyant, clumsy plume. I am afraid of garden spiders and green, thin snakes, the same ones whose predators are house cats and pesticides and whose […]
American Prora by Brady Alexander
The first time I saw infinity was on the Gulf of Mexico. Almost since the day I was born, I felt it absolutely necessary that I one day see the ocean. Some of my first memories are dumping worms into the lake, because if I were not to feed the fish, they may go […]
Odd Ducks
by Marlene Olin
Home is where you hang your hat, park your shoes, make your bed. It’s the place you boomerang back to. Barn. Stable. Coop. Cage. It’s the place where your belongings belong. I live in a townhouse community in Coconut Grove, a suburb of Miami. The more expensive homes sit right on the bay. The location […]
Writing Tips or (How I tried to get my niece—who asked—to change her mind on a writing career as she cavalierly jumped into the writing business after graduating from business school, quitting her six-figure accounting job only three months in while boldly proclaiming her Quixotic quest to follow her dreams, become vegan, pay off her student loan, marry for love, write the next great American novel, reconcile me with both my ex and with my brother (her dad), rescue a St. Bernard—in her apartment—one bedroom, downtown San Francisco, etc.)
by Ed McManis
Part One Thanks for thinking of me. It seems like we were just at your graduation. Hope you can use the blender. Too bad about the job. Yes, the business world is a desert; I guess yours was kind of a six-figure desert. Regarding advice: I’m flattered you asked. […]
Convergence
by Kathryn Hively
Side effects include: insomnia. But gone are the reverberations of the day’s thoughts, the should haves and second guesses. Gone is the ricochet of what could be, scenarios crafted with increasing fallout until, heart pounding and breathless, the night slips away. The worry remains in singular form. The roads may be icy in the morning. […]
