Fiction
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Garth Drunk
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…
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Helga Seeks the Unicorn
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…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bird Shoots Buck
As roommates, our cycles of sleep/wake/work were staggered, dictated by our graduate classes, or, during the summer, our crummy temp jobs. Chores lived on a whiteboard and were completed asynchronously. We figured the kid was, at a baseline, another responsibility…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Like Camels Raging
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…
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One of the Good Ones
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,…
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Rabbit & Ox
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…
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The Femcel Catalog a.k.a. The Annals of Obsession
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,…
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The Eeling
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…
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Mother Tongue
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…
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The Rumpus Prize in Fiction, Honorable Mention: Josie Tolin
By now the night has cooled, and the dune grass rustles beneath the mills. The light clicks off on the back porch between Trent’s house and Greta’s.
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An Excerpt from “First Time, Long Time”
He was more handsome in person, somewhere in the shallow end of his sixties, wearing a soft-looking black sweater and smelling of expensive soap. I could picture the place where the soap was purchased: one of those quiet, ritzy stores…
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Rocket Drive
This is the first time I’ve witnessed a person borrow food. There are many firsts in drug addiction.