FICTION by LYDIA SHIP There once was a black creature, like a lamb, like a cosmos, Jack-Jack. He couldn’t speak, but carried the soul of a sick boy, keeping watch over it.
FICTION by ANDREW BALES With Tom I rarely use my hands. They sit on my lap at the restaurant when the check comes, they wait patiently in the living room as he scrubs algae from the fish tank, they push together in prayer when I’m at my weakest.
FICTION by KARIN C. DAVIDSON What’s round on the ends and high in the middle? Chloe remembers only this. Her first inkling that Ohio even existed.
FICTION by CELESTE POTTIER “So meanwhile the oil spill is gettin bigger and bigger and now it’s the size of Texas,” Bobby Jo announced as she combed through the coarse thick hair of her elderly client, Maureen Holt.
FICTION by JESSICA FORCIER A farmer’s wife exploded in a ball of fire in the middle of a cornfield. We were all sure it was a freak accident, something wrong with the gas tank of the nearby tractor.
FICTION by DIONNE IRVING Her mother always calls England “foreign.” And when she does, it sounds even better than Peaches imagines.
FICTION by STEPHANIE DICKINSON You can smell oil in the air and the hummingbirds don’t like it. Jamer can’t hear them when Ivory’s around, but she’s gone inside. He closes his eyes.
FICTION by MICHELE RUBY She was a Seuss goose: a walking talking balking maker of rhymes. A speak freak. Whenever Susan was worried, frightened, excited, as she was now, a compulsion to rhyme climbed in her throat.
FICTION by SARAH DOMET I open the door to find my Sammie, standing there looking up at me with his hands behind his back like a miniature Jehovah’s Witness.