Fiction

In the time between emptying, the baby’s mother curled atop the spare mattress in the baby’s would-be room. The couple had bought two mattresses from a motel’s going-out-of-business sale—a king for the master bedroom, a full for the spare. They’d…

Because we had, during previous hang-outs in bars, gotten thoroughly obliterated drinking beer after beer, and because we had drunkenly parsed the emo-pop/punk divide and the boys had gotten into a good natured emo-pop/punk fight that soured, and because they’d…

Helga met her boyfriend, Adam, in college at a party. They’ve been dating for seven years, which is long enough to accept as a necessary albeit boring part of life, like filing taxes or going to the dentist. At one…

The job had a heroic narrative appeal. I could already hear myself sighing to my mother on the phone: the mouths I’d fed, backs I’d scrubbed. She’d ask what would happen if I caught it – if my lungs burst…

When I first met Matteo—that is, when we were both eight years old—I had the habit of falling madly in love with anyone who shared a desk with me. A boy would ask to borrow a sheet of notebook paper,…

It was Keefe’s first run since the wildfires, a week after an orange glow of an apocalyptic sky had greeted them one morning. Day 182, though she had stopped marking the calendar in Sharpie at Day 122, too depressed to…

When you were younger, you learned how to hold your breath so you could crawl on the pool floor. Down there, the day sounded different, so you swam for as long as possible. The rising hum of water encircled you,…

Most people had stopped working. No point in making money now. Those who continued either genuinely loved what they did, or had ended up at the bottom of the waitlist and had to find ways to get by until their…

You used to look in the mirror and your face would disassemble entirely: your eyes turning to twin river stones, your nose a stub of driftwood, the rounds of your cheeks the shells of beetles. Now there’s something more whole…