Fiction
by Nitin K. Ahuja.
“I don’t mind the night shift. I’m still new here, granted, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I mind it.”
by Paula V. Smith.
“They have carried his bed downstairs to the study where he can see the garden as he dies, with you, his collection of small gods, around him.”
by Rachel Hall.
“Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov wakes in gray light to the sounds of the injured soldiers in the cots beside him moaning, crying out.”
by Sahar Mustafah.
“Danny used to open the door and let me into his apartment downstairs at seven a.m. every Saturday. My mother would already be up, stooped over the kitchen table in our upstairs apartment, wearing her pale-blue nightdress, spreading tangy lebanah on a plate for my father before he left to open his grocery store.”
by Manini Nayar.
“Ammu has never known anyone who died. Not a grandparent or a rickety neighbor or anyone struck by what Ammu’s tightlipped mother, Nina, referred to (after six months of her own successful chemotherapy) as the C word. Ammu’s mother swatted away death as if it were a mosquito and marched forward into a robust if unchartered future.”
by Mark Rigney.
“Occasional lapses in taste or discretion within this narrative are entirely intentional. So, if it seems inappropriate to interrupt a tragic drowning with observations about the nesting habits of local birds, then consider this…”
by Parker Desautell.
“I had come into the hospital as I came into the world—twitching, foaming, groaning. I was almost brain-dead, they said, yet here I was, good as reborn.”
by Hadley Leggett.
“But here I am, and here you are, and once you’ve heard the whole story, it’s your job to decide: Am I the crazy one, or is it all of you?”
by Ian Baaske.
“Someone’s died. I know this because of vague posts on Facebook. It can’t be anyone I know very well, or I’d have texts or phone calls or, well, something.”