At sunrise on the first Saturday in March, 1970, as the body count continued to rise in the war in Vietnam, less than two months before the Cambodian Incursion, when campus protests would close down universities across the country, including mine, I sat in a coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach. On the…
John Lorimer wants to be friends on Facebook. Amanda isn’t sure whether to accept. It’s a long night like any other, her bedroom blue-lit by devices, laptop and phone and iPad scattered on the comforter, earbuds nestled as she listens to Songwriters/Folk on Pandora; this is how she goes to sleep. She has three or…
“I am ashamed to own them. You must understand that. And yet, to own them and not acknowledge them is even worse. That’s why I need you.” Charles pauses, to make sure I agree. I nod. My thoughts are elsewhere, but he trusts my serious expression. I call him Charles in my head, but address…
In the summer, your father starts taking in the strays. First come Pete and Jane. They’re from Texarcana and they’re spending a week at the El San Juan Hotel. When they walk into the Trolley, they sit next to your father. “This is paradise,” Pete says. He lifts his drink. “You, my friend, have got…
1. At first the women disagree over the saltshakers and peppermills and then the cookware and finally the utensils, until the bickering gives way to full-throated arguments and one stupendous scream-fest. When Miriam bursts into tears, Tamara follows suit. Within moments the two women fall into each other’s arms apologizing, consoling, and vowing never to…
1. IN WHICH MY TRUE HEAD MAKES AN APPEARANCE When your best friend smashes fluorescent light tubes across your chest, because you asked him to, because you thought it might mean something, because you need to mean something, and you bleed into a water tank while smart people watch and analyze, and the smart people…
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…
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…
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…
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