Special Issue: Winter’s Tales
Lost Gods by Karen Jones

Once I was small, held in another’s palm, running along life lines, diving into fate lines, skipping over heart lines, a horizon beyond eternity my only view.

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Slip by Jason A. Zwiker

You slip. Fall. Wonder what you’ve broken this time. You wait for some new pain to sound alongside the slow tolling that’s rang inside of you through years of pills in the morning and pills at noon and pills again at bedtime and of trying to explain the ones your daughter finds forgotten in the organizer when she stops in to check on you.

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Not If We Don’t Want To by Al Kratz

I feel like I’m dying lately and some days this motivates me to do everything I can before my time runs out and other days it motivates me to do absolutely nothing at all.

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Igloo by Emily Devane

The winter that Dad left, taking Dougie with him, we all built an igloo. That morning, the garden was covered in a thick white glaze. Mum couldn’t sit still.

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Hail by Misty Urban

My husband told me to choose the restaurant though we’d never been to this town. He drove past every place I named and then, at the edge of civilization, jerked the car into the parking lot of a chain restaurant I hate because the cajun chicken I ate at one made me sick for days.

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Amelia Earhart Knew Seven Latin Words for Fire by Joe Kapitan

Ignis, the flaming wreckage, bubbling rubber, liquified cloth, her skin charred and blistering, acrid smoke, the tiny thunders of survival’s kicks

Bog Iron by Shane Larkin

We make stops on the way to our bog plot to look at the little skeletons. Dad tells me about them. Curlews and skylarks in dancing poses. Tiny skulls.

Get Your Authentic Stardust Here by JP Relph

The night the sky cracked, I was sprawled on the hood of my car beside that good-for-nothing boy, naming constellations, ignoring his fingers on my neck.

I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours by Eliot Li

I tell you I’ve only ever shown it to a girl who I met on a tour bus in Moscow, where I was traveling with my parents. She had bad acne, and she really liked Duran Duran.

The Storyteller of Aleppo by Donna Obeid

In the barren cold camp, you wear a dusty cape and top hat, wave my cane as if it were a wand and tell me your dream-stories, one after the next, your words spun and tossed like tethers into the air.