Bathhouse Gossip
March 17, 2025
“They've swung in the opposite direction and they're all done with democracy and liberalism.”
Guernica
Fiction
Fiction
Fiction
Bagging Weight
February 19, 2025
"The billboards, giant screens, marquees are off like a giant plug was ripped out its socket. No cash on me, only a bundle of heroin and a useless Metrocard."
Fiction
Stained White Curtain
February 19, 2025
"Sometimes, when you live through hard times with loved ones—people you think you know best—old layers of their personalities begin to peel away and from underneath, shines through a new skin."
Fiction
Broken Endings, Uncertain Geneses
January 15, 2025
Coupled with her Tannie Sallie being ill, her mama and Elsie’s death and everything that had happened in this camp, her little mind was so sure that more cruelty would kill her.
Fiction
The Smoke of the Land Went Up
March 4, 2024
Material reality had suddenly decided to rearrange itself.
Fiction
Black Wing Dragging Across the Sand
March 4, 2024
The girl couldn’t just abandon those animals on the other side.
FictionSpotlights
The Chicken Line
March 4, 2024
What had these poor half-beasts done, besides exist in an ever-changing world that didn’t want to understand them?
Fiction
Sleeper Hit
February 5, 2024
He sounded ready to cry. If I could see his face better in the dark, it might have scared me even more. Who was this person who felt so deeply?
FictionThe Cutting Room
“The Last Time I Came to Burn Paper”
January 16, 2024
From Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel, River East, River West
FictionSpotlights
The Middle Field
January 16, 2024
A doctor told me the heart never forgets a child. If true, hers guards the memory of me like a jealous secret.
Fiction
My Mother’s Stalker
January 16, 2024
Only women are capable of occupying that oxymoron: alone together.
Fiction
Ground Zero
December 11, 2023
He’d tried to scrounge together a certain kind of life for himself in this reptile pit that teetered on the brink of the world, but he craved home.
FictionSpotlights
Komorebi
November 6, 2023
Somewhere on another continent, in a city far away, on the twenty-fourth of January, a clock chimed at midnight, indicating we had run out of time.
Fiction
If You Cut Me, My Mother Bleeds
November 6, 2023
There were limits to what you were willing to dare with a body that, by some weird alchemical feat of skin and blood, you shared with your mother.
Fiction
The Rebellion
October 2, 2023
I thought fondly of the comics and sketchbooks that had kept me sane and alive during my stifled childhood. I wouldn’t exchange them for this palace.
Fiction
A Temporary Arrangement
October 2, 2023
I’d hold my breath and keep still, resolved to treat the voices the way I would any bully. If they fed on my attention, I would starve them.
Fiction
Girls Like You
September 5, 2023
In photography class, you had learned to control your breathing, to narrow your focus and attention and direct it at one external object outside of you.
Fiction
Nectarivores
September 5, 2023
Jaime had hesitated with the birds, afraid to use them in a ritual, afraid of what they might return to him.
FictionSpotlights
Mousey Miracles
September 5, 2023
A Marathi fairytale in which a mouse comes to an orphaned girl's rescue.
FictionThe Cutting Room
Go More on Each Gallon
August 7, 2023
From Ben Purkert's The Men Can't Be Saved
Fiction
Our Lady of the Rockies
August 7, 2023
Why did they choose Sarah? Why did they come to my dry hundred and take, of all the people on this planet, my strange, bony wife?
FictionThe Cutting Room
Hauntings
July 5, 2023
How impossible, how suspicious, it feels to join myself, my girlhood, to the ways of white people who would prefer me and my family dead.
FictionThe Cutting Room
Draw Me
July 5, 2023
I was translucent. I was a rhinestone reflecting the moon in a parking lot.
FictionSpotlights
To Be in a State of War
July 6, 2023
Pity, when it exists, is tribal. In other words: I feel sorry for you because you are not like me.
Fiction
Intelligent Creatures
July 6, 2023
The starved omega had red fur on the tips of her ears. I could feel the saliva on her tongue.
Fiction
Sexual Tension
June 5, 2023
While I wish to remain unidentified, I’m also aghast that Lor doesn’t recognize me. My most authentic self is Convoluted Paradox.
Fiction
Blackberries
April 5, 2023
But it can’t be, I say to myself. Nothing is ever right. That’s just how it looks.
Fiction
My Friend Juniper
April 5, 2023
Even through my tears, I was dazzled and slightly cowed by Juniper’s presence, by her deliberate way of talking.
Fiction
He Who Fishes
February 6, 2023
My father and his younger brother tried to make me a man by forcing me to learn how to fish. Towards the end of my fourteenth winter, as soon as the lake thawed, my father wanted his father to begin training me.
Fiction
I Am the Ghost Here
January 16, 2023
I don’t believe that I will ever like Michelle, even though I love who she is when she is my brother. I want to accept the arrangement, but I am still having trouble processing the fact that the person I rely on is not him.
FictionSpotlights
Wajo
December 15, 2022
Two old acquaintances walk by an artificial river, recuperating all that they've lost in their conversation.
Fiction
Diary of My Leg Hair
December 8, 2022
I speak to my leg hair as I would speak to myself. Which is to say: with suspicion. Which is to say: with one ear trained to the sounds of a door opening and closing.
Fiction
Yellowstone
December 1, 2022
Since Ben’s death, I’ve been unraveling, the civilized parts of me spinning off to reveal the feral animal panting underneath.
FictionThe Cutting Room
On Waking in a Stranger’s Room
November 22, 2022
I look up one last time, and my father’s face appears at the top of the stairs.
FictionSpotlights
Koru
November 10, 2022
What is life but a series of lessons in holding on fiercely and letting go gently?
Fiction
Emil, Approximated
November 3, 2022
And maybe that was the point of it — to make the act of writing a temporary spark in a constellation of other temporary sparks...
FictionSpotlights
Cockroach
October 27, 2022
A child learns to care for the very thing that terrifies him.
Fiction
The Shape of a Person
October 20, 2022
I had, with threatening effort, lost fifty pounds the previous summer, but I still found my body pouchy and wrong, a pillowcase loaded with beans.
Fiction
Longer on Moon
September 22, 2022
There are days, astounding days, when we are returned to ourselves again and again.
FictionSpotlights
Cain’s Feast
September 15, 2022
A Mexican story that reads like a biblical tale of love and infidelity and a chronicle of a murder at once.
Fiction
To Kill a Horse
August 11, 2022
No doubt the reason we knew the animals so well was because my father was a vet, and so his life and our livelihood were fundamentally entangled with the lives of other creatures.
FictionSpotlights
Parasite
August 8, 2022
A man’s paranoia ends up costing him more than his peace of mind.
Fiction
Shooting at a Handcuffed City
August 4, 2022
The blindfolded city staggers a little without falling. Meanwhile, my father and younger brother call me to come over here and have a banana.
Fiction
Happy Fortunate People
July 28, 2022
Hamish was overwhelmed by the intensity...as if everything had been assembled just so, just right, in that moment for the two of them, coming around the corner.
Fiction
The Black Sea
July 21, 2022
He wasn’t sure when she began mentioning the curse. Later, when he looked back, he realized she’d said the word with alarming frequency since his arrival, spoken with the naturalness of words like bread and bicycle.
FictionSpotlights
Seven Months with the Witch Who Had the Broom
July 14, 2022
A young protester in Syria hitches a ride with a witch and leaves the world behind.
Fiction
La Otra Historia
June 30, 2022
I had every right to inhabit a space. If I were in Madrid to simply drink and eat and wander the city, I should be able to do so without being accused of mediocrity by the locals.
Fiction
Burning Blue
June 16, 2022
Momma was most always purple, but the night she died, she was strawberry drifting into shamrock. Your true color comes back after you’re buried.
Fiction
We’re Gonna Get Through This Together
June 2, 2022
It was the Professional Package that did it, that made Vero leave. She never said that directly, but that’s when we started falling apart.
Fiction
Yellow Summer Rain
May 19, 2022
No one knew where the FTs came from. Like the basketball that hit you in the nose out of nowhere, they just materialized in front of us and walked into our life with their long legs.
FictionThe Cutting Room
The Pearl Pavilion
May 10, 2022
Shrimp Boy emerges from beneath his table, locks eyes with me, and flees.
Fiction
Meant Well
April 14, 2022
It was hard to beat intelligence but impossible to beat stupidity, and 766 was brutally, inventively stupid.
FictionSpotlights
The Time Is Right About Now
April 7, 2022
A picnic ends in a brawl between two families divided by politics.
Fiction
You Girls Are Good
March 31, 2022
Our mother was a tiny stone, thrown around by something beyond her. Grandma was water, flowing to where it wanted, as it wanted, when it wanted.
FictionThe Cutting Room
Interlude
March 28, 2022
His cruelty was an afterthought, something clipped carelessly on his belt.
FictionSpotlights
A Well No One Can Reach
March 15, 2022
A haunted well is the only chance of survival for a child lost in the desert.
Fiction
It Was the Pishtaco
March 3, 2022
Flesh is a different color from skin, like when it peeks out from under a scrape or between the lips of a slash.
Fiction
Bad-Time Dimitri
February 3, 2022
For twenty-five years, every day, the phone would ring...and on the other end a voice, disguised in falsetto: Is it a bad time?
FictionSpotlights
Angel Lust
January 25, 2022
Everything is suspended, and into the void steps a powerful curiosity which draws them out of the bedroom and downstairs to see the truth of it for themselves.
Fiction
Organic Matter
December 6, 2021
Each yard contained a naked mother half-buried in a tub of dirt.
Fiction
Win Me Something
November 5, 2021
I wondered again if I should tell her my mom was not Asian like I was, to see if that changed things…
Fiction
A History of Killing Sparrows
October 15, 2021
One by one, the sparrows fell from the sky in exhaustion.
Fiction
Dance with Me
September 17, 2021
Once she spied Ellen in front of her computer, dancing. It was the most beautiful thing, the way her arms snaked as if they were channeling some old poetry.
Fiction
Rookie and the Djinn
August 20, 2021
Rookie could tell that the three individuals tried to look normal, but she knew they were not, not even a little.
Fiction
Speed of Mercy
July 30, 2021
Mal wanted to prove she was more than a thirty-year-old podcaster and obscure short-story writer living in her mother’s garage apartment gobbling mango lassi and Doritos.
Fiction
The Daintree
July 9, 2021
My dad and I don’t know what to say to each other, or how to cut through the choking weight of the day, or where to begin with the information. So, one day we decide to book a flight and go to the Daintree—to bird-watch.
Fiction
While We Live
June 18, 2021
The day after I found out my husband cheated, I licked a stripper’s titties.
Fiction
Dead Souls
June 4, 2021
They had sat there with all their worthy feelings about Zariyah Zhadan’s poetry, perversely enjoying the disruption of the recital by a finger circling the rim of a wine glass.
Fiction
Thank God Nothing Lasts Forever
May 21, 2021
They kissed because they wanted to, because no one could see them, because they could barely see each other, because their mouths were better off without words.
Fiction
Northern Spain, 1985
May 14, 2021
“We didn’t have sex then.” Luisa paused. “I just…made it up.” She kissed her sister’s shoulder through the cloth of her nightgown. A relief invaded Amaia; the force of it embarrassed her slightly.
Fiction
The After Birth
May 7, 2021
This whole idea, combined with the world “nuchal”—it made me hate Kay even more. I imagined her as this hunchbacked, creeping thing with a big bag of fluid on the back of her neck like a goiter.
Fiction
Absolute Best
April 30, 2021
But it took three months before she was ready to block Graham. She trembled as she prepared to do it, too, because she had just discovered she was pregnant.