I’m worried we’re too late. Mustangs and Astro vans and stretch SUVs brim over the Peppermill’s parking lot because there’s no such thing as an unbeaten path. It’s already hot enough to feel the asphalt cooking the soles of my cheap-leather, criss-cross sandals as we walk through the double glass doors. But this is our last-chance-weekend escape, our meet-up between the coasts, on the Las Vegas Strip.
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Discovery Kid: Longing for Pig Hearts, Stories, and the “Right” Kind of Knowledge, by Sarah Hoenicke
My siblings stand “at attention,” and salute me before I dole out their chores on individual, handwritten lists. We each have an alias printed on laminated name tags. We go on bike rides. I instruct them to form a line behind me, oldest to youngest, and then circle around to ride behind my littlest sister. And there we are: a wobbly snake; our helmets five points of backbone. It is in this way that our childhood sits in my memory. Rarely am I an “I” so much as a “we.”
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Balling by Jerald Walker
A private college in Boston was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Along with being criticized for its lack of racial diversity, one of its black faculty had filed a discrimination lawsuit, and another had complained to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. A third had quit. It was rumored that the president, under whose watch these troubles festered, was being forced to resign. And so when I saw their ad for a professor of creative writing, with a specific appeal for applicants of color, I could not believe my good fortune. The college, it seemed to me, like a flowering boll of cotton beneath the hot Georgia sun, was ripe for the picking.
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Unpredictable by Patrick Madden
Each sentence seems its own aphorism, a particle afloat humming in harmony with the others.
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Farewell, Cassini, How Far You've Come by Gabriela Denise Frank
Cassini’s impending doom stirred an inexplicable sadness in me. As the broadcast went on, I felt the bitter irony of human gains: here, we create a technological marvel who faithfully increases our knowledge—for two decades, Cassini has delivered images and data of thrilling celestial phenomena to our fingertips—and, in return, we send it on a suicide mission.
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Smallmouth by Justin Hocking
So many things fell into place after that dental exam. The twenty-seven previous years of painful shyness. My trouble pushing words through this tiny oral aperture. Everyone always asking me to speak up. The dentist helped me understand that my social anxiety has a physical component, right here on my face.
Read MoreCurses by Berry Grass
TNS stands in solidarity with the trans community. As a show of support, we are proud to reprint and celebrate the work of Berry Grass.
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Learning How to be Female by Annie Lampman
As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I was convinced that glossy “magazine women” were a distinct subspecies of human females who came out of the womb painted like colorful aliens, born complete with purple eyelids, black-lined eyes and thick-coated lashes, bright pink cheeks, and shiny-plump red lips. I studied them for hours, fascinated by their colorful flawlessness compared to the plain imperfection of “normal women.”
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Edge of a Piece of Cloth, Made Strong by Holly Willis
If I could I would sew for my sister a coat of soft leather. I would ply malleable pink hide for an effort so vital, but a gabardine twill is perhaps more practical. Gleaned from the coats of animals, culled from the cocoons of silkworms, scavenged from the seeds and leaves and stems of plants, remnants, vestiges, reckoning, reckoning.
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On Becoming a Person of Color by Anne Liu Kellor
She is used to defining herself in the negative—not quite this or that; or as divided—only half or part. She is mixed, which means that she has never seen herself entirely as Chinese, nor entirely as white. As a teenager, her friends were mostly white, in a school that was mostly black and white, so she identified with the white kids. Her friends would eagerly ingest her mom’s Chinese leftovers after a night of partying (where she’d teach them how to say, We are going to drink a lot of beer tonight! in Mandarin); she was their fun Asian friend, different, yet rooted in the same pop culture, white culture.
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Neighbor by Virginia Marshall
Virginia Marshall is a writer and audio producer. Her work has been published in The Harvard Review, Brevity, Atlas Obscura, and has aired on NPR and WBUR.
No One Here Named Me by Suzanne Roberts
At Burning Man, you’re supposed to resolve your issues with a Black Rock Ranger, someone who can come and negotiate problems on the playa, but I was beyond that. I wanted to call someone with handcuffs and a squad car, someone who could take him away. But would they? I didn’t know.
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Nurse Dog by Sarah Kasbeer
You feel like you’re wearing your body as a suit and suddenly you want to unzip it and leave it by the bedside. You feel smothered by something you can only identify as yourself.
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Chilean Wild Baby Pears by A. Kendra Greene
There is hardly a museum I visit where I don’t want to touch things.
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A Genius Moment, Or an Accident by Joe Bonomo
Such attention to arrangement and production details became Merriman’s signature on the hundreds of compositions—not only jingles and commercials, but corporate musical events and theme-park-ride music—he produced over an impressive fifty-year career.
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Hallelujah the Blind Gifts by Katherine E. Standefer
Oh Hallelujah the blind gifts, the foundation of all privilege. Hallelujah what we might call innocence, the idea that before things got fucked up they were once good.
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"If you didn't want to raise the dead (which we most certainly did not) then you couldn't have sex in the upstairs bedroom, the one with the red painted floorboards and the mattress from 1934, so choked up with dust that lying on it was like lying on a bed of skin ..."
The Long Night by Matt Jones and Jess E. Jelsma
Jess E. Jelsma is a doctoral candidate of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, Post Road Magazine, The Rumpus, The Normal School, Indiana Review, and various other publications.
Matt Jones is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Post Road Magazine, Slice Magazine, McSweeney's, Wigleaf, The Journal, and various other publications.
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, or How I Learned to Love My Paranasal Sinuses By Dinty W. Moore
These grape-sized blobs of I-don’t-know-and-I-didn’t-ask are what kept my sinuses from filling with air. They also kept them from flushing out all the horrible mucus. Thus: infection, pain, poor breathing, infection, gunk, embarrassment, infection, more pain, a box of Kleenex on every flat surface of my home, burning, swelling, infection, pain. Repeat cycle once each month.
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The Exhibit Will Be So Marked (Treemix 12” Remix with Fade-Out) by Ander Monson
A couple of years ago, I asked friends and family to make me a mix CD for my birthday, hoping to get 33 mix CDs, one per year I’d lived. I got 59, including some, pleasingly, from strangers. Somewhat predictably, though not unpleasantly, there were a number of Jesus-Year-themed mixes, though fewer Jesus-themed songs. I also put out the call to friends to pass it to anyone they thought might be interested in sending a mix CD. I made it a project to listen actively to each of these mix CDs and to respond by annotating, riffing on, and responding to the selections, and sending a note with my response to the mix-maker, or I suppose we should call her an arranger, since therein is the art of the mix.
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Panel Discussions: Look! Up in the Sky! By William Bradley
The recent PBS documentary Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle showed footage of a young Christopher Reeve talking about Superman’s continued relevance, as part of the 1980 television documentary The Making of Superman: The Movie. “We all know that the Man of Steel could leap over tall buildings, but the question is, could he leap over the generation gaps since the early Jerry Siegel / Joe Schuster days? We wanted to know if the man from the innocent thirties could survive in the post-Watergate seventies.” Then, looking directly into the camera, Reeve told the viewers, “Well, thanks to all of you, he’s doing just fine.”
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