Another Tester
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Aarti Monteiro
They sat at the dining table to eat, and she was glad for the conversation. It was as though no time had passed. Nilim looked older and more mature, and yet he was exactly the same as she remembered. The power went out with a crack as they finished dinner, and darkness flooded the apartment.
Abigail Oswald
I don’t remember their fights from my youth, only their aftermaths. That day I sat between them, the pew hard against my back, the air heavy, the atmosphere Baptist. When we all stood for the closing hymn, Dad’s mouth never shaped the words. He stood tight-lipped and stoic, his hand a weight that never left my shoulder. I caught Mom looking at him once, holding her stomach, like she was protecting something.
Aggie Zivaljevic
For ever so long, Iskren Syeveratz had watched over the island’s elders, who without their offspring were like oysters without pearls.
Alexander Carey
‘Nobody drives drunk,’ Joey’s dad said to the crowd through a children’s karaoke mic. He held some bowling trophy he’d won. ‘All keys come to the key-master.’ He passed his trophy-bowl around like the collection plate at church.
Alexandra Itzi
The summer between high school and college I worked in dairies along the border between Texas and New Mexico. I was a milk tester with my sister. For three months I smelled like misery.
Alexandria Narae Young
As my mother poured Miyoung a glass of juice, my father turned on the television, and I saw the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
Ali Raz
Two boarding passes and I’m sitting on a sofa in this airport, waiting for a plane again. I feel my fear in the palm of my hand. The old exhaustion. Familiar churning in my gut. It’s time to leave. I can’t wait.
Alice Maglio
She hates the locker-room shower stalls at the YMCA with the curtain that only covers most of you. She hates that someone could stand in just the right place and peek in. Like those ladies who walk around naked. Maybe they want her to be naked, too.
Allison Pinkerton
My sister Evie said her week of rest was Biblical, pre-ordained, saintly. She’d gone diva after becoming a YouTube influencer famous for faith healing. Dealing with internet trolls for six months, she said, entitled her to a week of watching Buzzfeed Tasty videos on Instagram while wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket.
Amanda Boyle
Everything was dark for a really long time. Her mind tried to push through in the morning, but couldn’t even then. She finally woke up surrounded by red vomit, and considered herself lucky she’d fallen asleep sitting up on the couch. She said “lucky” one or two times before it became meaningless. She was chasing God.
Amanda Oosthuizen
I find the white-eyed bird with the red beak halfway up a column of rock, and although he is dazed by the gathering heat of the day, I manage to coax him into the cage without difficulty. He is around a metre in height. He has grown since we last met and takes up most of the cage. I would like to feed him but I haven’t seen any mice for a while.
Ana Crouch Ureña
We should have known Eduardo would be the type to tattle. He was a hyperactive, annoying child with a tendency to boss us around, although at 8 he was younger than me by a year and had been held back in school.
Analeah Loschiavo
As it happened: You were hired to attend to a dinner party held in a lakeside cabin on a foggy night. You arrived alone and were instructed to bring your own cleaning supplies. For this inconvenience, you will be reimbursed.
Ananya Kumar Banerjee
A murder. In a town. Big enough to be entertaining but small enough that everyone knows either the perpetrator or the victim.
Andrew Cothren
Almost the end of our first day out and no one’s looking for us, far as we know. If we ever went to school or went into town more than once a month or were allowed past The Fence, someone may have noticed.
Angela Barton
I still haven’t finished my screenplay, and I have to admit I don’t know how. Why is my life important enough to write a script about? Why is anyone’s?
Angie Lee
The little dog clusters the sheep tightly around her master. Her eyes are perfect circles. She knows she’s done a good job.
Angie Sijun Lou
Back in your bedroom there was still a snoutless rat and a dishwasher filled with styrofoam plates.
Angie Sijun Lou
Some muffled auditory convulsion comes from the adjacent window, shades drawn shut and Christmas lights lit up just to ignore the summer.
Angie Sijun Lou
The sun feels like it’s raining pin pricks down all over my face. And overhead, the clouds are like tired panther gods reclining in the sky.
Ani Tatintsyan
I walked past him and he complimented my purse. I was carrying a box-like silver Ivanka Trump purse, I smiled and thanked him for the compliment. He said the purse looked like a briefcase and that I reminded him of a beautiful government spy, (I fell for it and him, then and there). In letters he would write me years later, he would mention the Ivanka Trump purse as a moment of importance in our relationship and by the time Donald Trump became president I wished that I never bought the bag and never met Ray.
Annabel Graham
It is a grey day and the fog creeps over the mountains like cotton stuffing spilling from a couch a bad animal has scratched.
Annabel Graham
Lola always drives. She likes to be in control. I let her have this.
Aram Mrjoian
Our fear, then, was that all the swag came with an expectation of high quality. We couldn’t rely on improvisation forever. So on that fourth day, Sanders cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled out to the crowd, “Does anyone have any screenwriting experience?”
Ariel Saramandi
Elise shook her head in reply. ‘You know, maybe I was a coward before. But now,’ she smiled, knowing how irritating her next phrase would be, and pleased she had come up with it, ‘but now I feel like my feelings have been cut away.’
Arielle Bernstein
The day before I found out we had ordered Chinese, which we ate out of plastic cartons, with plastic forks and knives, so that cleaning up was easy and that when we were finished enjoying our food we could just throw everything away.
Ashira Shirali
At arranged weddings as a child, she’d seen potatoey complexions, sagging jowls, mashed plums for noses under sehras, and shivered to think of the day when she’d be on that red velvet stage.
Ashley Lopez
When the doors of the Downtown A slide open, college couples exit—ping pong balls of intoxication bouncing into the night. You squeeze into the only vacant seat next to a man with his knees pressed together, oxforded feet crossed. He resides in the middle of a three-seat bench. His navy-slacked thighs press you into the partition.
Asha Thanki
I fill my lungs with flavored nicotine and imagine them turning brown and black inside my body – fleshy and soft and shit-brown. I am not good at fantasizing beautiful things. “Someone in my class says there’s going to be a curfew.”
Asiya Gaildon
As a child, I often felt as if my body was sinking. I don’t get this so much anymore, but then, it was real bad. I’d sit on the couch, and my heart would drop, my stomach would drop, and my feet would grow cold. My parents thought that American sensibilities made me an anxious child; perhaps the luxuries of sugary cereal and school clubs were detrimental.
Ava Wolf
My palms were slick with sweat. I smudged pencil lead across the linoleum, destroying the church, although now it really seemed more like an amalgam of haphazard shapes. There were now two things I couldn’t draw, I decided: cars and churches.
Bailey Pittenger
I think about what a happy vagina might look like, or what it would take to get an answer from someone about vaginal expression that isn’t based on irritation, indecisiveness, or weariness. I say, I wonder when vaginas look happy. No one responds. So I think about a list of physical attributes that are important to me in terms of sexual appeal. Balanced frame, comes to mind.
Belinda Hermawan
I tore up the paper. Coughed to cover the sound. Opened up my phone and played a video on YouTube of two service dogs chasing each other. The ad that played after was for cough drops.
Ben Rawluk
The Lord of the Flies was a different person from Stanley. He wasn’t interested in repeating arguments with Angela. He wanted to prove the scope of his genius; transforming himself into a monster made him feel decades younger and he wasn’t going to stop there.
Blake Sanz
Memorable as that was, he forgot about it after witnessing a stranger dressed in a purple wife-beater and black parachute pants who’d walked straight to him in a café and said, “You never did pay me, but if you still want it, I got that boot in the back of my van.”
Brianna Johnson
Her mom’s idea of good music was Kirk Franklin and Beyoncé. More than once Kenzi found her mother in the living room stumbling along as she tried to “get in formation” or convince Fat Dave to put a ring on it. She even had a shrine to the singer in her bedroom, photos taped along her dresser for “inspiration.”
Bridget Brewer
What was family, even? What were friends? Their names, so close together? Moths battered the windowpanes.
Brittany Ackerman
I was writing a movie script. I was taking calls about plotlines and character development in between shifts at the restaurant and singing hymns at Bible study. I was all in, as they say. I was all caught up, as it were. He wanted me to have a good time. When we walked into the lobby, a girl gave us waters with orange peels.
Brittany Bronson
My mother designed my costume at her nursing home three weeks before Safari Night, and it took her all that time to do the intricate detailing on the removable snout. Yet, best costume went to the guy with an elephant mask tied to his belt. The trunk fell just past his knees. Women leashed him around by it all evening, which most people found hilarious.
Cara Lang
I pick a blister off the bottom of my foot and he doesn’t even blink. Maybe I want to be owned. Or maybe that’s the only way I’ve been conditioned to understand desire.
Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt
An ambulance siren moans. Red beams zigzag across the walls of my room, like I’m back at one of the dances my high school used to put on. The ones my mother warned me I’d get pregnant for going to. Now that I am probably carrying Gary’s baby, it seems safe to say that nobody is getting pregnant at those dances.
Carson Faust
I was born in Ridgeville, South Carolina, in the house that my mother was raised in, but there were never any pictures of her on the walls. Grandma took them all down when my mama walked out on us. Grandma said she burned them all too, but I don’t know if I believed that. She must have kept a picture of her only daughter. I never looked for it though.
Chad Miller
In the photo, I’m in profile on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty on a cold morning. I have on a toboggan and a black and white scarf with a pattern to clash with my red and tan plaid hunter’s jacket. I wear mirrored aviators. I have a full beard. The sun off my glasses or the skyscrapers resolute in the background or my being there, in that harbor, where crowds dared to dream, must be doing it for Mom because I’m heartbroken in the picture.
Charles Finn
It is rumored in his later years he would leave his apartment in the city and drive through the night to arrive before sun up.
Chelsea Sutton
Yes, Audrey is wearing a graphic T-shirt with a depiction of Lake Arrowhead. After killing her, someone stuffed the earmuffs in her mouth and wrote #BroosterBabe in black sharpie on her right arm. Perhaps it has a meaning, perhaps not. Most things do not. Do not get lost in the details.
Chika Onyenezi
I had seen Arthur around for a while, at this particular station. Whenever I was coming back from work, at night, he stood there, smoking, and whistling through his trimmed moustache.
Cathy Ulrich
She has left instructions for you. Once you have memorized them, she wants you to eat them. You’d rather shred them into the garbage, but she wrote in big underlined letters: Don’t shred these and put them in the garbage.
Chitralekha Basu
I had been here before – in this ‘Mecca’ of Calcutta’s street food as Shankar, my chaperon from the Embassy, puts it. Nice man, Shankar. Seems to have an intuitive sense of when he’s needed and for how long, knows exactly where he belongs in the scheme of things.
Chloe N. Clark
His date had neon pink shellacked fingernails. Lance couldn’t stop staring at them. The glare off them from the overhead lights was almost blinding. It reminded him of headlight beams bouncing off a rain-slicked road.
Chris Ames
A bite on the line. He goes reeling. Happens faster the second time. The motion is so fluid, it appears as the fish is helping to swim through its own disassembly.
Chris Lorraine
I see life lines and love lines like I’ve never seen them before. As I look, I know what they say. Suddenly I know how to read, like my daughter. This knowledge is no longer inaccessible to me.
Christine Kandic Torres
Early in my relationship with Justin, back when we would cut whole days of ninth grade and spend them burrowing into each other underneath bedsheets of whichever friend’s parents weren’t home that day, he’d told me that Hector had taught him how to masturbate in the fifth grade.
Christopher Gonzalez
In silence Xiomara removes the knife from his grip then grabs the can of whole coffee beans off the counter. She takes from it a handful, letting the beans roll from her palm onto a cutting board, and Marcos watches them like marbles circling each other, unsure if they are following or trying to outrun one another.
Christopher James
This is my new gf. She doesn’t like where I live. Is it because of the fairy lights? I ask. She doesn’t say, she never says much, but she likes it more if we stay at her place, which is miles away. We go there after work sometimes, past a field with horses on the way. ‘Horses,’ I say.
Clarence Harlan Orsi
Behind the old woman, next to the shelf of vagina puppets, was a set of hooks for coats, unoccupied since we’d all draped ours over our chairs. She put one damp bag on each hook, spreading it carefully so it would dry. I imagined her home, the knick-knacks she dusted but never really looked at, the cross above the mirror.
Colter Ruland
Her name was Florida though she had never been there. Her mother really liked the name, the state too, the oranges and sunrays it conjured. One day you’re gonna visit for me and you’re gonna love it, her mother would say.
Courtney Sender
He asked me do I want children. Of course I want them. I want children named Yes and Sure and Always. I want children with dimples like his in their left cheeks. I want children like keys on a keychain, children to hold while I’m buying groceries.
Craig Ledoux
You may notice the boyfriend’s frustrated smile, a near-imperceptible curve, just before he dips into brief catatonia.
David Laidlaw
Recently something happened to me. That is, I saw something happen and I think that by seeing it I somehow became involved in it.
Derek Mascarenhas
Four days in Goa nearly killed me. It started the morning my bus arrived in Mapusa and I didn’t see my uncle Quinton waiting for me. A swarm of rickshaw drivers had crowded the bus doors when I got off.
Danielle Lea Buchanan
Morcella is her name and we’re twelve in Miss Conway’s science class talking kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species of the kangaroo.
Drew Johnson
After a time, the figure settled back down into his former place, became one of the bodies on the floor, unable on the one hand to discern a path in the jigsaw, unable on the other to force what will he did possess upon them. Then again, perhaps he had been afraid his warm gap on the floor would close.
Ekaterina Taratuta
One’s sight is never sated by the spectacle of a cathedral, since a cathedral never ceases to speak to man. And no matter how frightful certain words are, as long as we can still hear them the worst has not yet come to pass.
Em Meller
An alternative theory: now we mostly live in cities, and the lights are all on, we have a predator void. This accounts for our instinctive fear of the dark – even though predators, in the traditional lion-stalking-prey sense, are no longer hiding there. The void could make us collectively, completely paranoid, if we let it.
Emily Flamm
From his window seat on the plane he looks out over the ocean, which looks like a tangle of lines in this light. The light makes the water look alive. He can’t solve what time it is where he is, because he’s not sure where he is, precisely
Emma Cohen
I haven’t prayed in years, since high school when I prayed for a date to prom. When I used to pray I could feel a presence hanging above me, a great translucent presence high above, gooey, like a puddle of jello. I decide to try it out again.
Emma Sheinbaum
My dream is to be the funniest person someone has ever met. Maybe I am that something to someone. I talk to my therapist about my competing thoughts and resolute feelings. The friction gives me migraines. Can I be both rock and hard place? What is that phrase even trying to mean? I only want to see all angles of everything is that so much to ask for, so much to try for.
Emory Harkins
Dad smiles, shows us the wrong side of his face in this wide grin we haven’t experienced yet. I pat his back and feel guilty for not doing the same for Mom.
Fergus P Egan
What has happened to the feared North Cork Flying Column 22 that was the scourge of Ireland just a few weeks ago?
Eric Fershtman
That’s my entire point, says the psychopathologist. Because this is collective obsessional behavior. And it does tend to peter out after a while. It’s all I came to say. Dear World: please stop overreacting.
Erica Peplin
Their Christmas cards always came with a photo of them smiling, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. One year they were rock climbing in Fiji, another they were skiing in Switzerland.
Erin Kirsh
I search for a good sleeping posture as night edges closer to business hours. I lay on my side, then on my stomach. I hang an arm off the bed. I flip the pillow to the cool side and back. I think about Adrienne, how soft the blankets on her bed are. I try and try, but I can’t get comfortable.
Eshani Surya
So personal, the way he doesn’t stroke her hair as the ambulance wails.
Ethan Feuer
She picked the laptop up and pressed her ear to the keyboard. No eeee now. eeee in hiding. She had paid a friend to disable the fan awhile back—the noise had been awful—so all she heard now usually was a weak prickling sound.
Eva Dunsky
Sunny gets mad at me because I assume all of the children will die. She likes to remind me that there must be some like us, grave but no fatal cases. I concede that she has a point.
Fortunato Salazar
I’m sniffing and sniffing and my keen senses are closing in on…I’m not sure what. It’s just like when Dad took me to a bento joint in Los Feliz and said, “Zelda, here’s one that will stump you” and let me sip his tea. Anyway, I know I know that odor, but I’m distracted because the caryatid feeds me a chunk of her quiche (bacon!) and begins to tell Dad her story. Corn!
Frances Ray
Mothers liked me. I was prim, with straight hair. They delighted in how I didn’t need wrinkles or children to make me bitter, as I already was, and had been for a long time. I was smart for this, they ascertained, precocious. They went on to appreciate the neutral palette of my clothes, and then my culinary preference for thin soups and fresh meats, and then the precision of my parallel park. I was a serious woman, they deduced. I’d protect their sons. I’d keep them warm.
Fraylie Nord
We had storage units, ex-wives, and unpaid parking tickets down in the city, but we had since quit our jobs that tethered us to those lives. We knew how to tear things down and build them back up. We were in the business of predicting what people wanted, how, and when. We were doers and makers, bored to death by the pedigree we had earned in the trenches below.
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
The woman who gave birth and some life to Frankie came at the beginning of a storm. Later it was said that she brought the storm. Frankie says she is the storm.
Gregory Sullivan
15 had reportedly been roaming the streets, resting at times beneath the shady dogwoods of the neighborhood lawns, showing little fear of humans, even when the summer’s fireworks were being shot off, which was what really stunned the concerned locals.
Greta Wilensky
Cory’s mom loves couponing and thrifting and God. You can tell.
H.K. Williams
So banished to your room, curled up against the cold metal headboard you tried re-reading an old Nancy Drew. Instead you stared at the neighbour’s dog as she ran up and down the red steps at the back of their house. She was the closest thing you had to a pet.
Hadiyyah Kuma
I bought a goldfish in a dream once. She was modestly shiny, with scales like mirrors on a disco ball. My left eye reflected itself on her body if I turned the right way. I knew she was a she because she told me, right before I placed her into her bowl. “Okay,” I said, “good girl.” She smiled at me, a specious sort of smile that I was wary of but loved all the same.
Hana Mason
Bring the baby with you because your sister just wants some peace and quiet, just for a few minutes, please, goddammit.
Hannah Rahimi
A month after they married, Kevin found a job. “What a relief,” he said, and everyone agreed, though it was only a year-long contract.
Helen Chau Bradley
One Saturday afternoon, the unimaginable happened. In a break between rotations, I was sitting on top of the vault—my chosen lookout spot. All of a sudden, I sensed the air change around me. It was Larisa, pouncing up like a Lycra-clad cat to crouch at my side. Panic bubbled in my gut. Why had she come to sit with me? Did she even know who I was? We had never been so close to each other before.
Henry Giardina
Our young man would often spend his nights at their house. Claire would cook them dinner, and Antonio would regale them with tales of his job as a Bank of America clerk on Main street downtown. Oh, the characters he met there! He told of all types, all kinds of people in financial straights, making odd requests, and asking him why they didn’t carry lollipops in the foyer.
Ilana Masad
Charlie wasn’t a dumper, nor a dumpee. Things were pretty equal on that front. Charlie knew not to question the past, and did it anyway. With Evvie, it was always xx. Babes. That was the worst. Charlie wasn’t a babe, didn’t deserve the kisses.
Indira Chanrasekhar
Have you seen a doctor?’ I pointed at her hand. Girija shook her head. ‘Ratni brought some herb oil from the village. She applies it for me every day.’ The thick, green-brown fluid in the re-used Old Monk bottle near the stove looked foul.
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Of all human experiences, loss has the most intense redness. When a hope is expelled from our bodies, grief expands within us: to us observers, everything appears to be the colour of blood.
Ingrid Nelson
In high school Marian said to me about my favorite author, George Eliot. “Isn’t that just an old British man?” smiling like her mouth was a knife.
Isabella Martin
When her aunt called her to ask her about what it was like, Eleanor didn’t let on that she thought she might be miserable, or that misery might be in store for her, incubating under her skin. She had noticed on the trip down, trailer of possessions in tow, that some of the names were magical here, too, and this made her hopeful. Golden, Falling Spring, Backbone. Maybe they’d be worth seeing.
J.P. Moran
I know you may not believe me, since I’ve already admitted to lying, but the very true kernel of this story is that my father has, or, before his death from prostate cancer, had, a collection of clown art.
Jack Kirne
‘Two quarter-pounders, no patty,’ a small man behind the counter shouted. I almost let out a sigh of relief. Then, I remembered that one of the meatless burgers was mine and felt even more depressed.
Jackson Frons
My dad lives in London, where he works for a TV company. He manages all of their reality shows. Big Brother Norway, Survivor Sweden, Amazing Race Belgium, you get it.
Jaclyn Grimm
In July, the spare room on the second floor of their rental fills with flies. They try getting the landlord to do something—anything—about the flies, but they’ve only been in France a month and can’t remember how to say please. They keep the door to the Fly Room shut tight.
Jasmine Sealy
That night, Jezebel dreams that she forgot her purse on the bus. She chases the bus on foot from stop to stop, always a few feet behind, until it disappears around a bend. She wakes up aching. She feels like she has shed a layer of skin. She turns to David in half-sleep and when she speaks her voice cracks in the dark like static on wool. David pulls her closer to his chest. She says, “I’m always dreaming of losing things. I leave bits of myself behind wherever I go.”
Jason Villemez
We discussed the kind of crime he might commit. Most business owners would no longer prosecute for theft, the requisite time and energy not worth the potential recovery of property. Anything under a felony would net a slap on the wrist and a fine; there was no need for minor league convictions. Charlie had no desire to harm anyone.
Jay Boss Rubin
Water? Coffee? Tea? the receptionist asked. I asked for water. She returned with a small bottle and a rocks glass on a wooden tray. She set the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch, poured the water from the bottle into the glass, set the glass down on a coaster then left with the tray and the empty bottle.