Fiction
by Sarah Yahm.
“The ants in her foot went back to work digging tunnels and palaces and palazzos. She willed them to leave but they lingered and malingered and trespassed.”
by Pria Anand.
“Lydia dreamt, too. She dreamt of Carnivale, of the motorcade, motorcycles without mufflers and pickup trucks hung with paper cutouts circling the island.”
by Marcia Calhoun Forecki.
“Even numbers are smooth and sweet, and can all be divided by two, which is the most perfect number of all because two means love: husband and wife, mother and child, man and dog. That should be obvious to anyone.”
by Jennifer Lee.
“At what point, I wonder, does a person say enough is enough? I can’t go through with this; I didn’t pick the ending I’ve been given. I would dearly love to keep the next few years of my life.”
by Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka.
“You eat more and more, until you feel sick. Your mom says people are souls, but not you. You’re an empty body, filling up and up and up to make the emptiness go away.”
by Vishwas R. Gaitonde.
“Summer sapped the energy out of us all, the patients in the waiting room under a whirring fan and I in my consulting room.”
by Calvin Hennick.
“During the week we have left in Hawaii, Liz occasionally mentions that maybe I should go back to the hospital to see my father, and I say no, and she says family is important, and then neither of us says anything for a while. My dad has managed to ruin the trip.”
by Grace Glass.
“Mornings, Adam struggles up from his dreams to a blinding, ochre-tinged pain that sizzles up his damaged spine, seizes his neck, etches spiteful hieroglyphics into the base of his skull. He can’t help groaning but he does it quietly, because Rosie works third shift and needs her sleep. Before he hurt his back, he didn’t understand that pain is another person who travels with you…”
by Ian MacLean.
“In sleeping, Joseph’s eyes moved under their lids, as if he still searched the ward and the land out the window for phenomena. Planets churned in arcs and stars collapsed somewhere in that blackness, and he searched for this too, his eye movements aligning with the movement of heavenly bodies.”