I am eating Greek salad at Panera when my phone rings. I don’t usually pick up, but it’s been a week since my biopsy and I’m still sore and my right boob is bruised black and yellow and I’ve been waiting days that have stretched on like 600 miles of bad road. My boob looks […]
Featured Nonfiction
Your One Phone Call
Twelve Steps Ahead
by Evan Lavender-Smith
“Twelve Steps Ahead” was nominated for The Best of the Net. This is one of two instances in your life when you will receive these instructions. There is only one step you’re allowed to hear this time—the last one. It will be the first thing you hear when you’re born and it will be one of […]
The Po’ele Box
by Kirby Wright
I SWEATED IT OUT on the floral-print couch between Troy and our mother. We were waiting for my old man to get home. My brother gnashed his gum. Jenny was visiting her friend Heidi Bathen and I was glad she was gone. I saw our reflection in the living room mirror—we had looks of impending […]
Bike to the Future
by Krista Foss
Image courtesy Kelly Sikkema The scrap yard at the north end of my long city street hummed like a dystopic anthill, the day I drove up in my 15-year-old compact car, parked in front of a heap of flattened wrecks winking in an oily sun, got out, and made my way to a busy […]
Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda
by Gerry Canavan
Academics who study science fiction have typically been fixated on what they see as its privileged relationship with futurity. By imagining a possible shape for the future that will someday arise out of the present—however prescient, realistic, or patently ridiculous a particular author’s imagination of that future might be—science fiction narratives help restore to us […]
The Miracle of Ordinary
by Janette Schafer
The only things that remain of his past as a drug dealer are the physical indicators: pocked track marks in the creases of his arms, outlines of faded tattoos from decades ago, scars from the knife attacks of heroin-starved junkies or pushers trying to thrust themselves into his territory. He is a quiet older man […]
