FICTION
The Drowning Mothers by Aishatu Ado
CHAPTER ONE — INTERMENT The sky should hold its breath while we give you back to the ground. Instead, it breaks open, spilling a gray so heavy our heads bow without meaning to. Rain stripes the casket, beads along…
Nostalgia UTI by Trisha Dhar Malik
Packing up an old home into boxes. Heat of Bombay in May—impossible. Sweat everywhere. Sticky nostalgic and sad, the scene—not poetic or sexy. Sound of that stupid fan, an old creaky man. Over and over and useless like a…
Everybody Knows by Jaclyn Port
It’s summer and everybody knows that’s the best time for an adventure. We have to have an adventure because we are In Everyone’s Hair and There Are Too Many Damn Kids In This Damn House and It’s A Lovely…
Calamansi by Joseph Cusi Tian-Delamerced
By the time Mama wakes up and Lolo steps outside, the calamansi is already in Gabe’s pocket. Gabe sits cross-legged in the dirt, palms empty. Lolo squints at the tree. “Everything is like this when no one’s looking.” “Like…
The Walking Dead by Stephanie Gangi
Jackie gets onto the elevator from twelve. She says hi to Barbara from sixteen, already on board. Sixteen is the penthouse but no one calls it that anymore, that’s elitist, although the Art Deco button panel still shows PH. …
Minefield by Alison Gibbs
They called the children night commuters. You used to find this strange, writing fundraising copy at your desk in Sydney, trying to squeeze emotion from dry UN reports. For you, the term conjured up Dickensian images of children going…
Sleeping Arrangements by Alice Ashe
Keep. Keep? I said keep. Sure, all right. These too. Keep? Keep. Okay. And—keep. There’s still nothing in the donate pile. Keep it. Anyway some of this stuff we might use later. Hon. We might. Well. Sure. But someone else probably needs…
Two Old Friends and a Ghost Walk into the Woods by Anna Vangala Jones
We’d agreed to never come back to this place yet here we are. The wind whispers through the trees and unsettles our hair, trying to remind us to leave. Why would we return to these woods? “I don’t care…
23 Images in Your Gallery of Absent Things by Angela Kubinec
1. Fallen leaves are a quiet palette of cut glass; they are a funeral in the church of nature. They make you think of pastry, damp strata from an earlier rainfall, or spirit-shadows looping into the distance. You want…
Grandfather2 by Greg Hrbek
Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…