Fiction

What Remains

It was too late when I was called in, but it was probably always too late, which is to say there was really never any hope. People didn’t want to believe that—even some of the people who were closest to Beth, maybe them most of all. They would ask me for a long time after…

Rosalee Carrasco (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: FICTION)

  In fiction, our winner is Tomiko M. Breland, for her story “Rosalee Carrasco.” Ploughshares’ fiction editor Margot Livesey writes: “In the elegantly structured ‘Rosalee Carrasco,’ Tomiko Breland describes the before and after, as well as the actual events, of a very particular day at middle school. The voice is elegant, empathetic, and vivid without…

Solo cover: an old black and white photograph of white men and women dancing

Pie (Solo 3.1)

She was wiping the counter down for closing when he came and seated himself on a stool, asking for pie and coffee. There was nothing special about that, nothing special about him. He was in working clothes, a heavy cloth jacket, gray to begin with, and blackened now at the elbows and cuffs. He didn’t…

Solo cover: a kitchen counter with pasta, a rolling pin, eggs, snails, basil, and tomatoes

Twice Eggs (Solo 2.9)

Anna is in the orchard wearing a sleeveless housecoat, lifting a stone from the Roman road discovered a few feet away. It was unearthed a week ago during the gas line extension to Taranto. The stone fits a low wall in the garden she’s planted with nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, firecracker red peperoncini hot peppers whose oil…

A solo cover of a colored geometric "V" pattern with simple black and white lettering

Small Country (Solo 2.8)

for L.S.K.V. “I’m gonna kill you,” Gina says in my ear as our camp counselor, Eunice, shows us around. “Tonight, in your sleep. If I haven’t killed myself first.” I shrug Gina off. “It’s one week. We’ll survive.” Secretly, though, I’m dying inside. Nothing I’ve read or seen on TV ever suggested that US summer…

A solo cover of a piano drawing inside a floral circle with thick red text

Urchin (Solo 2.6)

Chicago, 1960 In the big old Nordling house near the university, at the far end of the long, tall living room, there was a baby grand piano. The piano was next to an open window with gauze curtains that almost reached the floor. Astrid Nordling was standing behind them, hiding from the grown-ups sitting over…

A solo cover of a drawn blue woman's back, facing a golden opaque mirror

This Blue (Solo 2.4)

The lobby was a crunch of necessary blues, blues from a lifetime, blues stored up and colonized. On the floor-length, brocade drapes, silver vines and chrysanthemums crawled on a pale blue background. The walls were painted throttled midnight blue. Blue Oriental rugs tic-tac-toed across the floor. Two nearly purple wall lamps glimmered, and under a…