She’d been so good at laying still. Good at being frightened. During one of her early jobs, a gig where she’d started off alive, breathing long enough to be assaulted, the man had been so careful, making an effort to talk to her between takes
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LGM-1 by Robert Paul Weston
From my window, I watched the pool’s plastic pit return to its former glory. Only when the refurbishment was complete, the pool refilled and made usable, did I discover Cathy existed, that the dull-but-probably-well-to-do couple next door had a daughter the same age as Gretchen Lowe.
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Minor Lightning by Victoria Barrett
We walk straight toward the things we want or need or have to reach, leaving a wake of our longing in the bare dirt behind us. We roll our eyes at the olds’ advice to slow down, to “savor,” such corny bullshit, we’ll slow down, maybe, when we arrive.
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Henrietta by Dan Shields
Scuttling toward me with the fat pink knuckles of her claws, assembled inside the shell I’d just thrown. Her body at home in the ugliness I’d created. She was my best friend instantly. I named her Henrietta.
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Horses by Walter Weinschenk
"We run as one, staunch, impassive, each of us different, all the same: bay, roan, pinto, palomino, as many types as there are dreams imaginable but we rush as one array, jet-like above the gravely ground at horse-speed, a single panoply that thrusts forth in perpetual motion and straight pursuit, headlong into pitiless wind"
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Aquifer by Sean Theodore Stewart
"When I spoke, I surprised myself by saying things I had been too bashful to admit to the aquifer before. I gushed. I waited for her response. The water enveloped me."
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Orchid Children by Becky Hagenston
They sprouted leafy tufts around their necks, their feet took on a moldy sheen, their toenails were atrocious. You couldn’t keep these children inside.
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Foreign Objects by Lexi Pandell
A horse can grow a stone in its stomach the size of a grapefruit.
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A Woman Without Origin by Elaine Hsieh Chou
The woman went abroad and began to lose her grip on things.
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Mermaids by Emily Lowe
They cut the tongues out quickly, cleanly, like a wire through wet clay.
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Sowing Ground by Elliot Alpern
Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
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Soulcraft by Larry Flynn
She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead.
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Father Francisco Makes a Friend by Charles Haddox
Amid the maize and sugarcane fields, the village looked like a collection of cupboards painted white and left out to dry in the wind. Barking echoed over cactus and discarded glass bottles. Sunday mornings in San Juan Camotlán were usually quiet as a broken-down motorbike.
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Backwards T-Shirt by Genevieve Abravanel
It was like the old days—the earliest days—those chatrooms where lines of text concealed everything except your wit or the way it unraveled but they had already unraveled, now that everyone was home-bound except those who didn’t and got caught by the authorities and everyone wanted that job.
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Gus Who Sells Body Parts Down By The Railroad Tracks By Marya Brennan
When we first started dating, we’d stay up past sunrise doing nothing but blah blah blah, but then the Sad Thing crept in, and my husband refused to speak. The silence in our house is making my ears shrink, I swear. I stick a cue tip in and each day it swirls a little smaller. One day it won’t fit at all.
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Little Pelvic Bone by Jessica Fordham Kidd
The mother bit the very tiniest tip off the snake’s tail. It tasted metallic and felt tough between her teeth. Then, she tossed the snake into a stand of privet hedge.
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Empty and Sparkling by Katherine Indermaur
Every night the man came home and saw the progress his wife was making on the mirror. Somehow she found just the right place for each shard, the right edges to slide alongside one another.
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Dawn of Graduation by Mike Yunxuan Li
When the decision letters came, he didn’t even open a single envelope from the Cali schools. He believed the East was where the heart of the country resided. Surely, people there would notice his intellect and talents. Surely, they would give a shit about the stuff he was passionate about.
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Leaning into the End of the World by Matthew Hawkins
The punishment at the commune for having relations that weren’t explicably geared toward procreation was exile. The risk made it even better.
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Growing Pains by M. M. Kaufman
Then I met this guy—and he was really very good at parties. Maybe that’s when I should have run.
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