She caught a glimpse of her eyes on the screen and felt they held the fact that she’d finally found the very thing the internet had been invented for, like she had arrived, and this was it. But it wasn’t; it was just that her eyes were wide from losing focus and watery from wear….
Evenings I meet Angelo in the parking lot behind Whataburger to get high. This has become such a ritual that we don’t even talk about it anymore. We just meet up in the same spot right behind the dumpster, a small patch of creosote bushes that shield us from any onlookers. It used to be…
In fiction, our winner is Mengyin Lin, for her story “野火烧不尽/no prairie fire can destroy all the weeds.” Of the story, fiction judge Gish Jen says, “This gutsy and ambitious story nimbly ranges over five cities worldwide, chronicling the 2022 protests to China’s COVID-19 policies—a project fraught with not only political risks but artistic risks,…
Diana forgets the second half of her line as Emily Webb, distracted by the puffy sleeves of her costume, an otherwise unobjectionable 1930s “day dress” printed with tiny blue roses and belted at the waist. She swats at one bloated shoulder, wishing she could find the gravestone of the genius who came up with this…
Whenever Susan Bridge heard friends or family talk of inklings from the other side, or of being watched over by a lost loved one, she inwardly dismissed the idea even as she strove to be loving and attentive in the circumstance. She felt sorry, of course, but considered that in each case, bereavement was dictating…
Jamie was in trouble again. That’s what I first recalled of events leading up to the Breadshow. It was a Wednesday—one of Mrs. Riordan’s teaching days—so I had to go down to the elementary school on her behalf. While she was showing housewives how to beat eggs or pan fry a steak, I was dealing…
A mother works on you slowly. When she called me the first time from the ER, I bought it. She’d never been before, not that I could remember. Later, my mother reminded me of when I was in high school, and she’d broken her wrist. She had been climbing garden walls again that year. My…
When we lived above the laundromat, Eliana and me, we used to have a movie night almost every Tuesday night. This was before the days of streaming video, back when everything we watched was on VHS and DVD, back when everything felt simpler, purer. Back in those days, we used to rent our movies from…
Harry sat listening as the host of a podcast he’d recently found detailed the ways in which climate change was destroying the savannahs of Africa. He’d listened to another earlier that week about how fossil fuel emissions were killing birds in the Everglades. His car, an old Passat, grumbled softly beneath his seat, and he…
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