Fiction
Caroline listened to the bellows under her bed, drawing and blowing air. The room asserted itself, always, its rhythmic hiss and pop of machinery, the anti-lullaby of metal cocoons, rows of them, each containing a complicated person.
Is this why, when she finally gets out of her car and sets out to walk with the sun shining on her face–a blessing, sunlight like that–that every grievance, petty or perceived, begins to drain away? She breathes in and out, happy to be outside, happy to be breathing.
My mother believed it was important for a child to witness healthy communication about difficult topics. My father allowed this as long as I remained quiet and didn’t interfere.
by Adriana Golden.
“…what started as an alibi could be a salvation. Yesterday, I flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet, all at once. They flocked out of sight like a swarm of tiny pink beetles.”
I’d sit there and look at the glossy paper in my lap, at the strings of black letters arranged in neat columns on the shiny vellum, my twenty-four-year-old son next to me in his infusion chair joking with the nurses or listening to his headphones or watching something on his computer, not looking at me or the magazine.
And so Parker didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes. He had conversations with his uncle’s physicians, both the primary-care doctor and the hotshot guy in charge of the transplant team, who spoke rapidly and repeated himself, a verbal twitching. The only clear thing that Parker recalled from the conversation was the number two: two percent mortality rate among living donors.
by Jonathan Strysko.
“He had the urge to immediately order a CT scan, but the patient being his daughter, he didn’t have the luxury of calling the shots. His mind instead wandered to the more obvious epidemiologic questions: How? When?”
by Shastri Akella.
“When they play chase after, they aren’t Madhu and Boy. They’re the mythic boy gods, Krishna and Balarama, and Ajay, one of the many demons that the brothers chase and vanquish.”
by Jason Baum.
“He asks if he can put the radio to a country station…the guy is going into space for a year so I let him. Who knows what kind of reception he’ll be able to get up there.”