She remembers the vodka-clear starts of nights. Leggings, suede jackets and crimping hair, her sister separating strands.
Your Brother’s Medium by Gail Anderson
Encaustic: hot wax tinted with pigment, and each week as you step through the door of his studio, breathing bees, balancing your basket of cleaning things and trying not to see the dark stain on the wooden floor, you understand a little more.
The Middle-Aged Mothers Fantasize About Christine’s Dating Life by Kate Faigen
They take the train to Christine’s downtown apartment. They hold martinis and drink up her tales, every delectable word.
Motion to Present the Defendant’s Pinterest Boards as Evidence by Jo Gatford
Tealights and wedding favors. Chalkboards and house rules.
In this house we smile and we smile and we do not let it slip.
Scars by Suzanne Hicks
We were never young like the other neighborhood kids. We were old like we had our own house key and knew how to boil noodles that we ate for dinner.
Boilermaker by JW Goll
Butchie and I drive north on Water Street, heading into a sunrise that warns us to keep on our toes, this could be the day it all goes to hell.
A Girl Shaves Her Head by Ruth Joffre
One by one, the hairs grow back fuchsia and periwinkle, grow like thistle and sea urchins, surging back short as lichen and tall as sunflowers.
Odd Job Jane by Lorette C. Luzajic
Mission: to rid winter of imps and karakondžula. I had no idea what the sign meant, but I applied. I needed work.
Bittersweet by Lorette C. Luzajic
It was never easy going back. The gloom was as thick as the damask drapery, and their enormous dusty tassels seemed symbolic somehow, ornamental bonds.
A Dance with the Devil by Lorette C. Luzajic
The start of the sound, Sunday salsa in the square. The ice xocoatl is my only relief from the oppressive blaze of the sun, but the locals don’t seem to notice or mind.
You can’t miss something if it comes back by Frankie McMillan
My sister said she was coming back as a bird, that way she’d be able to see what was happening from above, be able to see our house, me dawdling to school
Infinite Density by Joshua Michael Stewart
Paul couldn’t understand what was happening to him. Each day he woke up a little shorter. I must be shrinking, Paul thought.
Clearance by Jeff Young
She cleared out dead people’s houses, kept something from every house – a spoon or a postcard maybe, once a Bay City Rollers badge, another time a glass swan — binned the rest of the menagerie.
A List by Curtis Smith
I sat down to make a list of the reasons we no longer sleep together—but there’s no list, just the one thing neither of us want to talk about.
Growing Through Grief by Angeline Schellenberg
When Leanna’s mother dies, her father takes up gardening. Purple loosestrife and puncture vines sprout from between his lips: winding up her mother’s tomato plants, covering Leanna’s window, clogging the neighbours’ eaves, injuring cattle and choking wetlands, blocking out the sun.