We came to learn how to heat up the earth to cool down the sky. On the first hot day of a scorching summer, we drove in two vans, eight PhD candidates and two professors from the University of Illinois, two hours south of campus to the enhanced geothermal testing system at the research institute outside Flat Rock, Illinois.
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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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tripping (in)dia by m.m. gumbin
The plane lands, I look out the window and see the outdoors spinning upside down, round and round. I’ve woken up in another century, somehow sittin’ next to my beloved grandparents.
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Three Stories by Jessie Carver
By day, she sprinkled into the river alfalfa blossoms and quail feathers and hollow flutes of cattails and tiny shells and smooth skipping stones—offerings to protect her family—chanting incantations of please please please.
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Kingdom Phylum Class by Kara McMullen
I’ll release it amongst my mother’s hollyhocks and tomato plants and watch it shudder away through the grass, feeling like some dark corner of myself is going with it. I’ll resume my search for something lethal.
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Alpha Romeo Fifteen by Quintan Ana Wikswo
We box in the park and when we hit, our first faces crack and shatter. Underneath, now, I see his second face. Narrow and deep.
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The Nightfly by Libby Cudmore
She poured coffee from her thermos and pulled herself closer to the microphone as her cue neared. 'Nina the Nightfly here, with tunes to get you through the long dark night. My lines are open, so call me up and tell me what's on your mind. I bet I've got a song that'll fit how you're feeling.'
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Pigeons, Again by Hannah Gregory
A pigeon. The LED on its collar blinks. Kendra cups its body the way she holds her coffee to warm her hands. The message tied to its leg is unanswered.
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Filet-O-Fish by Wynne Hungerford
We had become fish in time. I smelled my shirt. It smelled like fish, like fry. It smelled like where we had been.
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Stinktown by Matthew Goldberg
In Stinktown, we scavenged for trash. That was our big industry. We’d sift through huge mounds of garbage, searching for stuff we could use for trading purposes.
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The Students by Harrison Cook
At recess we didn’t move our feet on the playground. What was the point? Some of us rubbed the tattoo under our arms like chimps, or rubbed the spot just above the belt line, scratched the back of our shoulders where wings would grow.
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Hot Shit by Amy Kiger-Williams
We walked around the neighborhood like the queens that we were. We licked our fingers and touched our asses. Our fingertips sizzled the moment they hit the denim. We smoked cigarettes behind the shed, then took long showers and brushed our teeth, even our tongues, to get the smell off.
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The Shark Catchers by Margaret Redmond Whitehead
The men believed they were the shark. They saw it as a mirror: on one side, power taut behind silvery skin; on the other side, hard teeth inside predator’s mouths. Their incisors were remnants of a shark-life. The slick of their lips were meant for water.
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Banished to a World Without Magic by Annie Tupek
Gone. The farm was gone, too. And the castle. All that remained were his vague memories of that other life and his magical self that had lived it. That missing self knew his fairy godmother.
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The Playground at Night by Nick Story
They had never had a playground like that. They had had to work from a young age and played with rocks and sharp pieces of wood. Their lives had been hard, and it was difficult to see children whose lives were so lucky.
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We Had A Superhero by Brian Druckenmiller
He stood tall. His posture and leotards emphasized incredible physicality, as if his muscles’ muscles had muscles. With his hair slicked back and chin held high, he oscillated, projecting zero visible confusion—the antithesis of our expression.
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