By Phyllis Brotherton
My wife
You drive me there, down Highway 99 to Bakersfield, east across the Tehachapi (it is spitting soft sleet at the summit, swirling dark clouds, a foreshadowing we delight in and to which we are oblivious); intersecting with I-40 at Barstow and continuing eastward across the endless rest of California;
By E.J. Evans
Iwas living with my girlfriend Laurie in a little house in the Town of Danby, a rural area about 10 miles south of Ithaca, New York. I woke to a gray morning, snowing heavily. I had to leave for work but I wasn’t too concerned about the snow, because I drove a 4-wheel-drive Toyota pickup and like many pickup-driving men I loved my truck and had a certain amount of macho confidence in my truck’s ability to handle any kind of road conditions.
By Erik Anderson
Much later that morning, as he moves southeast down Fairview, Subject remembers the opening of a video installation inspired by Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment, a book about surveillance told in long run-on sentences, one per chapter, sentences from which the reader can’t escape, that’s the point, and which had a glancing relationship to the network of cameras recording viewers as they passed through a series of rooms, their captured images cleverly remixed and projected throughout.
By Katy Masuga
I found out yesterday that a friend from high school died. She had two little kids. Two years ago she found a lump in her abdomen. They removed a twenty-pound tumor and a kidney. Said she didn’t need chemo but needed regular check-ups.
By Nicola Waldron
We’re inside the old police station, just the two of us, in a room that might once have been a holding area. It’s the right size and shape for a cell. They’ve had to paint the wall, but you can still see the notches; the kicked-in bits.
By Mara Naselli
At ArtPrize, the largest art competition in the world, a crowd had gathered just inside the DeVos Convention Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
By Kent Monroe
The story we all know has God simply resting on the seventh day, but in my story he spends that day adrift in melancholic contemplation, tracing the face of the Girl Who Killed Her Family on a glowing nebula. Then he weeps inconsolably. Then he vanishes inside a photon and lets it all be.
By Sierra-Nicole Qualles
Honey, I must have run out of ideas when I spent the night on the balcony. Two dogs below wanted me to jump down to them — spend some time and have a drink in the gutter. I told them no and that I was waiting for a ghost’s head to put my hands on.
By R. Zamora Linmark
Monday, June 13, 2011
2:05 a.m. Jet-lag-inspired tosses and turns. Entire building is moaning to Adele, Rihanna, Lady Gaga.
Nth attempt to get past Jacques Jouet’s: “At this point, the story will follow some paths that may appear whimsical on the surface.”
By Karen An-hwei Lee
1.
For the last orange tree, a masquerade of a dozen myths —
On the corner of Iglesia Oasis de Gloria, out of a coastal mesa where the freeway ends at a beach city, in a soft albedo of hidden southern California suns
By Monica Macansantos
We didn’t know about them until the early 1990s, just as I was entering school. “Comfort Women,” as soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army once called them, were women abducted from their homes in countries occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War, held against their will, and turned into the army’s sex slaves.
By Susan Daitch
In the city there are trails of discarded three-dollar umbrellas. They blow into tangles when they meet one another, black nylon (though maybe it’s not nylon, but something even more synthetic, of more recent vintage than the nylon, say, of the Nixon era) and metal spokes like so many Y’s, V’s, and palsied X’s.
Jennifer McGaha
Thick-boned and freckle-faced, Barbara sat between Christy and me in our third-grade classroom. It was 1975, and our class was part of a cluster of four classrooms dubbed “The Beehive.”
By Abeer Hoque
Chubuike is darker than the darkening evening. Bottle smooth ebony skin. Next to Ivan, a Bangladeshi boy, he is a shadow bouncing around the gymnasium. All the Bangladeshis and Indians in Nsukka coo over my sister Simi’s butter honey skin, but I have little patience for this particular South Asian prejudice. My inner eye for beauty resolves with the dark.
By Colette DeDonato
The woman seated in the neurologist’s office is here for two reasons, the first of which is that the woman has implicated herself as a victim of brain deterioration which she believes to be either 1.