This won’t be on the news. Ten minutes after the announcement, with the classroom door slammed shut and the desks stacked in front of the door, I realized one important fact about the hard lockdown: it wasn’t a drill. Six middle-school girls—one from the previous period finishing a test, five working on a quiz for […]
Nonfiction
The Warrior Is In The Building
Broat
by Jennie Ziegler
[1944, The Ardennes] The buzzing performed nightly. Quiet could settle thick as a tongue onto an uncleared field. In the mornings, men would climb out from the earth like beetles, like living things, to see if someone had left food for their snow-lined stomachs. Or news. Deep in the waking woods, a Midwestern boy huddled […]
Revision
by Lior Torenberg
I’ve never been able to write about a particular heartbreak that occurred over five years ago, and so I enlisted the help of AI to do so. I was inspired to do this by Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts” (published in The Believer in 2021) in which she does the same in order to help process […]
MAYDAY Staff Poll: Best “Break Up With the Job” Films
The MAYDAY staff propose their favorite break-up-with-the-job films and TV shows. Celebrate spring by quitting! Or, rather, vicariously quitting through “Office Space.”
Stigmata
by Gabriella Graceffo
Halfway up a mountain, I’m desperate to see a ghost. Not the way I used to be, letting faucets drip at night, leaving light switches half-flipped; a dozen small gestures begging supernatural interference. Now I look for ghosts to understand why my body feels more haunted than any place.
Resonance
by Ginny Bitting
Pythagoras said you can hear all notes in the sound of one plucked string. A single tone—the fundamental—triggers both overtones and sympathetic vibrations.
Year-End Wrap-Up: The MAYDAY Editors’ Books of the Year, 2022
This year, we’d like to specially feature our amazing friends at Brilliant Books, who style themselves “your local, long distance bookstore.” Though they feature a brick-and-mortar store in Traverse City, Michigan, Brilliant Books distinguish themselves as being one of the largest independent online book retailers in the country, and a crucial example of success in […]
Geranium
by Brittany Price
My mole has gone to Arkansas for analysis. I think: it’s been to Arkansas with me before. I think: it’s the first time my mole’s gone anywhere alone.
Q&A with Novelist, Memoirist, and Nonfiction Contest Judge
Darin Strauss by Elliott Bueler
“Memoir is not quite a record of a life; it’s a record of your memory about some part or parts of your life.”
Thirty Things Overheard While Attending My Friend’s Wedding
by William Musgrove
1. One half of a couple staring at a woman in a pink dress resting her head on a picnic table: Shh, she’s the one from the hotel.
2. The other half pointing at the man sitting next to the woman in the pink dress: Maybe he kidnapped her, and she has Stockholm syndrome.