I am watching a fat kid eat. A girl, this time. With none of the daintiness heavy girls sometimes affect at meals, she stokes fry after fry into the glowing scuttle of her mouth, building steam against the last three periods of the day. When she giggles through her nose at something a friend has […]
Fiction 79
Debra Liese: Bread
I gave myself a fake black eye a few years ago. It wasn’t meant to be a big deal. It happened the way you might, in some reverie, find yourself signing another person’s name over and over in loopy, liquid cursive. I was in boarding school. At that time, I hadn’t hung photographs of myself […]
Jacqueline Kolosov: Inked Into Skin
Though he could not see the blue lines without the help of a mirror, just knowing they were there carried him back to the intricate maps that once adorned his grandfather’s mahogany-walled study, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the main harbor in the Port-of-Spain. How proud his grandfather had been of their family’s history. Only later […]
Megan Harlan: Missing
It all came to a head when I mentioned to my boyfriend Tim that I might want to get a cat. I’d always had cats as a kid, I told him, and our new apartment seemed to need one. Of course, I didn’t mention the hole in our lives in our new apartment, which I […]
Susann Cokal: Last Meeting of the China Moon Pain Club
Irene gave herself credit for trying. She had made an honest effort. But no amount of urging could convince Anne to celebrate her birthday in a real restaurant, one with table service rather than a buffet: It was the Santa Fe China Moon or nothing. “It’s our tradition,” Anne insisted. “Yours and mine and my […]
Olivia Birdsall: Things Left Behind
I pull the emergency break back until it grinds reassuringly, a sort of audible punctuation. Over the steering wheel, out the window of the car, I see a hand-painted wooden sign planted in the patchy grass outside of the building: “Donner Pioneer Museum.” My little brother Danny and I have driven an hour and a […]