What had these poor half-beasts done, besides exist in an ever-changing world that didn’t want to understand them?

And my eyes were closed for that ganglial instant of ruin

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?

From Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel, River East, River West

A doctor told me the heart never forgets a child. If true, hers guards the memory of me like a jealous secret.

My family is mouths spread wide like wounds, telling everything but the story that must be told.

Only women are capable of occupying that oxymoron: alone together.

He felt endangered by the solitude, even at risk of vanishing.

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.

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.

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.

Once the flower emerged, the itch subsided.

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.

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.

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.

Jaime had hesitated with the birds, afraid to use them in a ritual, afraid of what they might return to him.

A Marathi fairytale in which a mouse comes to an orphaned girl's rescue.

From Ben Purkert's The Men Can't Be Saved

Those were definitely human voices coming from the kitchen hood.

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?

The fantasies I uphold in order to protect myself in fact strip me and break my heart.

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.

I was translucent. I was a rhinestone reflecting the moon in a parking lot.

I had been afraid to ask where there was.

Pity, when it exists, is tribal. In other words: I feel sorry for you because you are not like me.

The starved omega had red fur on the tips of her ears. I could feel the saliva on her tongue.

The keys all had expressions, just like their owners.

While I wish to remain unidentified, I’m also aghast that Lor doesn’t recognize me. My most authentic self is Convoluted Paradox.

This was the one story I never told my child.

If I wanted to be transformed, all I had to do was wait.

But it can’t be, I say to myself. Nothing is ever right. That’s just how it looks.

Even through my tears, I was dazzled and slightly cowed by Juniper’s presence, by her deliberate way of talking.

I was a chatty child, but I knew not to talk about my mother’s disappearances.

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.

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.

Two old acquaintances walk by an artificial river, recuperating all that they've lost in their conversation.

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.

Since Ben’s death, I’ve been unraveling, the civilized parts of me spinning off to reveal the feral animal panting underneath.

I look up one last time, and my father’s face appears at the top of the stairs.

Under her bed in her tiny bedroom: a box of secrets not worth keeping, but not worth revealing either.

What is life but a series of lessons in holding on fiercely and letting go gently?

And maybe that was the point of it — to make the act of writing a temporary spark in a constellation of other temporary sparks...

A child learns to care for the very thing that terrifies him.

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.

It would happen painlessly, God assured, although what did God even know, Ruby wondered, about pain?

There are days, astounding days, when we are returned to ourselves again and again.

A Mexican story that reads like a biblical tale of love and infidelity and a chronicle of a murder at once.

That night, I sleepwalked into the sea.

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.

A man’s paranoia ends up costing him more than his peace of mind.

The blindfolded city staggers a little without falling. Meanwhile, my father and younger brother call me to come over here and have a banana.

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.

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.

A young protester in Syria hitches a ride with a witch and leaves the world behind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shrimp Boy emerges from beneath his table, locks eyes with me, and flees.

When the seeds arrived, Elin thought they were a memorial gift.

It was hard to beat intelligence but impossible to beat stupidity, and 766 was brutally, inventively stupid.

A picnic ends in a brawl between two families divided by politics.

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.

His cruelty was an afterthought, something clipped carelessly on his belt.

A haunted well is the only chance of survival for a child lost in the desert.

Flesh is a different color from skin, like when it peeks out from under a scrape or between the lips of a slash.

Everyone joked about how the two brothers’ names had become their destinies. Sihai, four oceans. A man forever moving. Weijia, settle down. A man who makes a home.

He warned her there’d be no easy fix.

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?

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.

He says, "Here are some ways I think you can improve this week."

Each yard contained a naked mother half-buried in a tub of dirt.

This baby is an owl-baby. If I have this baby, it’s going to kill me.

I wondered again if I should tell her my mom was not Asian like I was, to see if that changed things…

An excerpt from the short story collection All Shades of Iberibe

One by one, the sparrows fell from the sky in exhaustion.

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.

A middle-aged woman at the front desk yelled: Welcome to the new dimension! Her uniform was tight but also disheveled. Her eyelids were lacquered in turquoise shadow.

Rookie could tell that the three individuals tried to look normal, but she knew they were not, not even a little.

If she could photograph every moment of her life, she would always remember.

It was clear from the officer’s first words that we were in trouble.

"We wear masks anytime we leave the apartment. We order groceries and pay the motoboys big tips. We both suspended our private practices. Botox is not an essential service, though my patients would disagree."

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.

The golden dome of the loaf soared higher than the roof of the house. The arms of the trees stretched, as if animated by actual will, and brushed the crusty top with their leafy fingers.

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.

An excerpt from the novel by Pik-Shuen Fung.

The day after I found out my husband cheated, I licked a stripper’s titties.

I was a pledge the first time I heard “locals” spat out like a slur.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Hunting for retribution in a budget casino can make you question your life choices

You tunneled into reason: that many earthlings you had observed had enjoyed ecstatic many moments already where they had relaxed into the comfort of being invisible.

It is customary in cases such as these to express regret and plead for mercy. You will hear no such words from me.

Obum stretched his hand with the same carefreeness that he reached for Ralu’s balls and turned up the volume.