Nonfiction
by Angela Tang-Tan.
“The first time I witness a thorax opened, it is on a twenty-five-gram mouse. Heavier than most because she is gravid. The second time, it’s on a thirty-year-old man.”
by Jacqueline Kolosov.
“‘Why are there so many moths near the lamp, Mama?’ my five-year-old daughter Sophie asked, as we sat at our patio table a few weeks ago, the purple-rose of twilight of late April having by now given way to night.”
“Hurricanes are not a common occurrence in New York City, but on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall with extraordinary force.”
by Nikki Schulak.
“My mother wanted to see a whale before she died. In a boat off Montauk, Long Island, we puked over the side railings for the entire four-hour tour. No whales.”
by Dwaine Rieves.
“‘A really great deal on batteries, you hear?’ my father yells to me, his voice full of its old energy and a half-chewed biscuit. We’re eating breakfast, his attention on the television, mine on a newspaper photograph that captured President Obama at the groundbreaking of a new factory in Michigan, a battery manufacturing plant, as it happens.”
by Kelly Flanigan.
“I walk into Scott’s kitchen, sweaty from basketball and needing something cold to drink, and there’s his mom in just her underwear…”
by Kurt Magsamen.
“Cadavers don’t look much like anatomy drawings. They don’t smell much like anatomy books. The drawings are clean, ordered, the striations of muscle cells combed out tight and smooth, like the strings of a harp…”
by Margaret Brosnahan.
“A dozen dead ponies hung from the ceiling, strung up by chains at each end, their ragged bodies in nose-to-tail formation like a ghoulish merry-go-round…”
by Judy Rowley.
“Almost every night throughout my childhood I prayed that a miracle would occur, that I would be able to hear perfectly one day.”