Jaydn DeWald
Their marriage had grown miserable, well nigh irreparable, from over a decade of neglect and nonpassion: if he struck up a conversation, she’d wander into a distant room; if he touched her, she’d snort and writhe and shoo him away.
Jean McLarney
We were told to hit those in the passive role. Every time we swung our hockey sticks at their necks, their visors would flash with EXP points. For anyone passive the object of the exercise was to get enough EXPs to level up to Emotional Stability.
Jen Knox
Kings or 100s: strength or time. The small, dry station is rarely robbed, but the front window occasionally shatters with the impact of hand-thrown bricks. Dozens of cartons of cigarettes swiped dozens of times each year.
Jena Vallina
I have seen the hearts of most creatures set upon the table, but never the heart of the wolf.
Jenessa Abrams
Death and silence you decide after unzipping your pants. You put your hands on the top of the urinal and steady yourself.
Jennifer Blackman
These questions do not make me laugh like they would on a night when I was not starting avalanches. These are people who do not recognize their limits.
Jennifer Lewis
Tanya kept her eyes on the elm’s slippery bark. Thanks to the Internet, she knew everything. She knew it was the size of a kidney bean, and if she waited any longer—a blueberry—then, a kumquat. She had never tasted a kumquat, and now she never would, because it was a fruit that she wanted to forget. She nodded yes.
Jennifer Sears
“Looker,” Peggy said as I hustled Gilligan’s order to Jailbait, our 16-year-old grill chef and the boy Peggy slept with off and on. Peggy had a thirteen-year-old son and a husband who’d turned funny after his return from Gulf War Number 1.
Jenny Bitner
And that was when he introduced me to the concept of child sharing, an idea that he had evidently been rolling around in his head since he was in high school. He had the idea that we could find other people who wanted to have a share in our child—people we liked, who didn’t want their own baby.
Jenzo DuQue
I can hear him through my shut eyelids. Bent over in a fit, I wheeze against the radiator, indifferent to its warmth. Somewhere in the kitchen Jorge opens and closes drawers, each emitting a different hollow note. He intends to bury the ashtray—probably among dirty porcelain, empty take-out boxes, and more mugs. I recover, only to knead dust on my fingertips. The apartment is filthy, that much I can tell. His mother, Angela, may she rest in peace, would not approve.
Jeremiah Moriarty
Dennis and Susan were relatively new friends of Liza and Natalie, and they were those people. The kind that made Audrey feel both resentful and vaguely turned-on at the same time. Well-educated, straight teeth, J. Crew everything. She found herself genuinely wondering what their skin care regiments entailed, and she loathed herself for it.
Jennifer Dickinson
If only he could be Jonas Delvecchio, who lived in a real house just three bus stops away. Jonas had been adopted as an infant by an Italian couple who drove Porsches and took him skiing in Madrid every year. Because of his parents, Jonas knew things the other kids didn’t. Saline swimming pools didn’t dry out your skin as much as chlorine. The most comfortable pillows were made of down. Purebred poodles were better behaved than purebred Chihuahuas.
Jess Pane
Bud was surprised she was talking to him though he realized she had waited until the other men had left. Bud looked her over as he knew the other men had done too. She shifted her weight in a way Bud had learned women did when watched by men. She wore shorts that must have been jeans once: tight and patched. Her shirt had dried sweat stains and a ripped handkerchief hung out of her back pocket. It did appear she had slept outside.
Jesse Ruddock
Tomasin watched as her mother hung a shirt over the right arm of her cross. Blood moves – it skirts – she could feel it. But her blood didn’t just shuffle along as she breathed out, trying to slip the shirt off her arm and onto the ground by force of will. Her blood rushed insurgent from her heart in a current all its own. It was a river that pulled her under and through its rapids and lulls. This was, by now – she was sixteen and had never felt different for a day – familiar. The shirt fell.
Jessica Berger
He was my husband, but I called him dog. When he returned from the woods each passing dawn, from wherever it is that wild things go, he would whimper and scratch at the door.
Jessica Johns
When my sister finds her eulogy, she’s really not impressed. And she should have been quite happy, I think, considering I managed to come up with so many nice things to say about her.
Jessica Malordy
On the afternoon that the king’s herald arrived the goosegirls were not minding their geese. They were at the stream, barefoot and barelegged, the hems of their shifts knotted and clutched in their fists as they waded through the water. They made their way to the boulders at the center of the stream. Their hair, long and dark, hung free.
Jessica Miller
Anastasia still clings to the superstitions of her childhood — she never wears new shoes on a Wednesday and she once sacked a maid for leaving the bread knife sticking out of a loaf. She sets great store by omens, and fortune tellers, and Baba Iagas. I swirl the cup for a third time. ‘I see —,’ but there is still nothing. The leaves, settled in a thick veil, seem to be obscuring rather than revealing something.
Jiaming Tang
A sharp, split-second pause. My Grandmother describes this moment inconsistently. With each telling, there’s a new detail: a fisherman to watch, a beggar to pity. The fisherman, waving a switch in front of his bucket, crouches beside a farmer heating bricks in a kiln. Both stare open-mouthed at the smashed egg; their reaction (Grandmother claims) is shared by a passing cadre, who shouts, a giddy falsetto creeping into his baritone, “What a shame!”
JL Bogenschneider
I first read the manuscript – the samizdat – on my only excursion to the Territory, part of an official engagement in which I’d been invited to act as interpreter to the Ambassador of the Outer Region. It was a rare opportunity to visit the notoriously secretive state. My diary from that period is due to be published later this year, although this is about another story entirely.
John Goldbach
The Riviera descended the dark mill hill and in its lights were geese waddling out of the way, some hissing, wings spread, waddling quickly, and we pulled into the mill parking lot. “What the fuck?” said James, stopping the car.
Jorge Cino
Where you’re going I don’t know, and whatever’s motivating you to get there is none of my business, but please tread carefully. Out there, it’s going to be tempting to throw away everything you know about yourself. You’ll find excuse after excuse to take on new personas. And then you won’t know what parts of you are real.
Joseph Cáceres
All of a sudden I jumped in fright. My five-year-old cousin, Nina, was walking through the hallway like a resurrected corpse—the kind that search for brains in those low-budget movies we weren’t allowed to watch—and she crashed into me as I stood before the doorway of my father’s room.
Julia Chan
She grips the handle of her suitcase hard, so hard her fingers begin to cramp. The wave of passengers buoys her toward Arrivals. A sudden intestinal twist in the corridor reveals a large glass door, like a screen that shows the people waiting on the other side.
Julia Sternberg
As the train rattled through the darkness, she reached into her pocket and felt the ticket stubs. She ran her thumb along their ragged edges. She was tired and weak, dizzy with the day’s efforts, but it had been worth it: now her boy would have a good life, with a good mother who could afford to shop at fancy stores and take him to the zoo every day.
Julie McArthur
Marla was a polite woman. If a man wanted to sleep with her she never refused. With each new man, she adopted a cat—Fluffers McGee for John, Marion for Paul, Tiddlemouse for Richard, and so on.
Justine Champine
Red roses with blossoms the size of a baby’s head grow wild over the windows, and there is a tiny freshwater pool out back where schools of minnows frantically multiply and move together as one dark, quivering arrow.
K. Joffré
Kathy Bates wasn’t actually the actress Kathy Bates, but a corpulent queen who was also in the bar performing right after Kelsi. She was feral. Her makeup was bright red and white, applied liked war paint. I could hear her screeching from backstage.
Kaj Tanaka
If you visit the public spaces of my town, you will find men flexing for one another. You will find men checking out one another’s biceps and triceps and quadriceps for tone and mass. It is lonely, being a weak and ugly man in my town.
Karolina Letunova
When YouTube University voted her channel down, the message was clear. No one cared anymore about Esthetics of Architecture. The comments popped faster than she could read them: “higher-world problems,” “elitist hack,” “come down and we’ll show you the real world.” Those were the mildest.
Kat Solomon
Two weeks later, a big envelope arrives in the mail. Her name is Lucia and she is seven years old. She lives in Ecuador. In the picture she looks small, and when he puts her height and weight into an online BMI calculator, it confirms that she is slightly underweight. Not horribly underweight, not exactly starving, but still. The organization sends a piece of stationary and he writes a short letter, with simple sentences.
Kate Hao
She looks exactly the same in every way but I know it isn’t her. The woman who is not my mother dips her knife into the neon yellow plastic bucket inside which the cantaloupe sits. Standing in the middle of the upstairs hall bathroom (the one where I always forget to turn the lights off), she looks up at me and speaks as I enter, the tip of her knife poised on top of the melon, ready for incision.
Kate Jayroe
We went to a party. It was at Marv’s place. Marv is a real sort of fellow, a no bullshit type of bullshitter. Marv shows office furniture, in the office furniture showroom. He has no belief in God. At Marv’s party, there was a warm handle of vodka and some Dixie Cups on a fold-up table in the very center of his studio. He wore a hat, though it wasn’t flattering. This is just further proof of Marv’s hard sort of kookiness.
Katherine Fustich
Everyone was stuck in tar somewhere, or lingering outside of coffee shops with open doors and air conditioning that blew into the street and created small patches of frozen land for the taking. No one bothered speaking—the mouth was a cool dry place that needed to be preserved.
Katherine Packert Burke
I wouldn’t call us friends, exactly. She used to bring me small things—baked goods and thrift shop kitsch. A lunch pail decorated with Ninja Turtles. A little zoetrope of a running horse.
Katheryn Krotzer Laborde
Steve was the type of guy who had a nice voice and assumed that made it OK to burst out in song and make the world a better place.
Kenan Orhan
Dad was a Chelyabinsk fan through and through – if only because of his father’s dislike of them – but he’d as soon pray for SKA to slaughter us just to complain about the mismanagement, a martyred prophet preaching displeasure from some afterlife of defeat.
Kevin Grauke
After driving Daddy home as gently as I could, so as not to jostle his aching noggin, I asked Guy about their night together. He said it had gone fine, but then I reminded him that I’d sent him with a purpose in mind.
Kiley McLaughlin
The third mother will be sent for by a man on the mainland who is seeking a wife. After she arrives, she will imagine getting into a bathtub and pulling a mattress over herself, and then she will do it. Two weeks before this, when she meets her smiling white in-laws for the first time, the sky will turn to bruised green, and they will usher her down into their basement.
Kim Chinquee
He once raped me in a heap of leaves in the woods. It was at a party. I don’t remember much besides hearing the laughs of the rest, who were probably by the fire pit, talking about a band or maybe graduation. I remember he was strong. He smelled like dust. Before he brought me there, he told me he could love me.
Kim Chinquee
I sit on a chair of my new house. The chair is yellow. The chair is new. I look out to the sleet, the shadows of light. A motorcycle passes.
Kim Winter Mako
I myself have worked on Law & Order. Met Mr. Jerry Orbach. Twice. Once I played a bartender. No lines, but there’s a close-up shot of me pouring a beer. The second time I played the killer’s cousin’s friend. My lines were—“Manny, let’s go!”—“So maybe I don’t like cops.”—and, “He told me three o’clock.”
Kimberly King Parsons
Of course what looked like effortless collaboration came at the cost of brutality. It was about breaking them down, dismantling the thing that made them bigger than you. His father taught him that. An elephant can stop a show just by sitting.
Kindall Gray
There’s something extraordinary about a woman being so blond. I guess men always look for something extraordinary in a woman. I mean, maybe, maybe not, but for me, if a woman is extraordinary, I’ve got to have her. I’m not saying you aren’t extraordinary—this is going to be cruel!—but what I am saying is that you’re cute, you’re cute like Drew Barrymore-cute, but Stella is beautiful like she-just-stepped-off-a-private-jet-and-she-wears-expensive-underwear-beautiful. That kind of beautiful. I like your hair fine. But I like hers better. Stop looking at me like that. You wanted to know the reasons. I’m giving you the reasons.
Kendra Guidolin
She just wants a fresh start, and to come into herself in a way she hadn’t been able to with those who knew her as the sister of the dead girl, the dancer whose nudes got leaked…
Kenta Maniwa
As the old white lady stood there, with her slightly slouched, guilty-looking body language, I realized that there was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t place it. It was like she was one of my close friends’ grandmothers whom I’d met before briefly, but I knew that wasn’t correct. Then again, she looked like every white person’s grandma.
Kizilbash
They spend the first drink verifying that they speak a common language: where do you think LeBron’s going to play next year? What did you think of the new Drake album? Have you heard about Jay’s new girl?
Kosiso Ugwueze
Chisom and I were best friends and worst enemies. We were always fighting. We gutted ourselves like the fishermen did to the fish on the boats that hovered in the horizon. Something about Chisom always pricked me, pushed me to the edge of madness. But she was my best friend, my only friend.
Kristin Vuković
Ana had never understood this growing apart that her divorced friends had described. It feels like you’re talking to a stranger you’ve slept next to for years, one friend had said. It felt like rust; a breakdown, a weakening of bonds.
Kristina Ten
There is a tenderness to the way MJ cradles the whirling molten orb. Alice, shameless exploiter of the museum’s generous discount policy, has seen it a hundred times and still not enough.
Kristyn Dunnion
Reggie Toombs’ velvet-chainsaw rumble, the voice of Detroit. Ray can’t help picture a bear of a man, grizzled chops, wide heft to his stooped shoulders, the back of his padded swivel chair worn from sitting, night after night, just so.
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I thought that after I turned the age he was when he died that I would feel some monumental weight of time, like each second would be a reminder. That didn’t happen. The initial depression came and went and then days passed slowly while years passed quickly and now we are here.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick
The You men are for the end-end of a night, when B’s hand is between his legs. He stares at them and squeezes himself. He thinks about the You he can be with. He imagines himself on the You. He touches himself and imagines that the You is touching his body. He imagines his own hand is another hand. He feels himself become someone else, as if he is watching himself and the You enjoying each other.
Laura I. Miller
The other part is that he’s such a fucking terrible imposter. In life, Ingrid Lynn was a poet, so she thinks in terms of metaphors. She can say that he dances without grace and inflects the letter r in a way that conflates meaning. She says his eyes are dead. She says he gets whole stanzas wrong. She says he’s an automaton.
Laura Tansley
made for a touch more
tender than mine—
Laurel Sharon
“I had nothing. Other couples held hands or sat close with their shoulders touching, but not us. Other couples continued to have sex and find satisfaction in each other even as the years went by, but not us. Once when ill, your father sat on the edge of my bed. Other than that, I remained alone. In my own house, for years I was alone. I never liked Roy, either.”
Lauren Barbato
The girls had heard from the boys that the boys were looking for the girls.
Lauren Hooker
The woman who goes before me is an alcoholic but she’s in deep denial about it. Sometimes, when the white noise machine isn’t working, I can hear them yelling at each other on the other side of the door. DO YOU THINK IT’S NORMAL TO DRINK A BOTTLE OF WINE A NIGHT? my therapist yells, and the woman yells back, YES I DO. But at other times I can hear them laughing away like old friends, and I think to myself, a little bitterly, that my therapist never laughs that way with me.
Laurie Stone
She slid off the counter and in front of her mirror began applying my lip gloss to her beautiful, wide mouth with its curling, upper lip that now looked like a beckoning finger. She wore a sly expression, watching me watch her. She placed the tube of lotion I had given her with her pile of things. I didn’t say anything. I was unsure what tone to take.
Leah Bailly
I also occasionally fell into a coma. I would dream of Las Vegas past, when I was a kid, when I flew down with my grandparents and we could still go to the Sands and the Silver Slipper and the Stardust. They would spend six weeks in the desert every winter in a motel two blocks off the Strip with a pool and a large Yiddish clientele.
Leah Bailly
The first time I smoked speed, I felt my lungs expand so wide that they took in an entire tropical sea filled with miniature sea creatures that swam up and down my chest and tickled deep into my balls.
Leah Johnson
I wonder if we say we love each each other for ourselves or for the people we’re saying it to. Or if we do it because we know we’re running out of time, like we must share it for fear of never sharing it. Or if it’s just another way to say I see you. Another way to be seen.
Leah Sophia Dworkin
The city is sinking and about to go underwater. You don’t understand that the city is sinking and about to go underwater. I can smell the trash outside getting wet with anticipation.
Leah Yacknin-Dawson
Clementine thought how ordinary this pain was, how almost every person in the world had, at some point in time, felt split-open and sick from lost or unrequited love.
Lee Matalone
Everyone looks innocent when they’re asleep. It’s more than vulnerability. It’s a transformation, a regression into childhood, further, to infanthood.
Lila Rabinovich
And yet the sex did not get better. He was a determined giver, but missed the mark so predictably that I began to find his efforts in bed comical. He wouldn’t correct course even when I nudged him quite forcefully, a failure that I ascribed to a stubborn overconfidence on his part.
Lindsey Skillen
The final touch would be pineapple wedges, apparently, and from where I was on my knees next to Ilsa I could see him assaulting a whole pineapple with a rusty butcher knife. He obviously had no idea what he was doing, but Ilsa and I seemed to be in silent agreement that we were going to allow him to be the man of the house when it came to the pineapple.
Lisa Hanson
If Nell were in town, I would’ve opened the Pinot Grigio and I would’ve been laughing. I’d have been convinced into the red dress. On my own I drank mint tea and gazed into the dark mole at the base of my neck, feeling tragic. Its single hair seemed to have darkened, thickened, even. Plucking was not an option – I imagined blood, the necessity of a bandage or a turtleneck. Even trimming unnerved me. I’ve never had good depth perception. I didn’t trust myself not to miss the mark completely.
Maddy Raskulinecz
Jacob was trying to be alone with the alligator when his mother called him into the house for dinner. His mother didn’t know a thing about it; she didn’t even know the difference between an alligator and a crocodile.
Madeline Gobbo
The test began. The students worked diligently to fill the bubbles they deemed appropriate. Livia watched one young man methodically draw frowny faces within each bubble and then cover them over with a flurry of graphite.
Lisa Piazza
If you think I see Sibley, if you think I see Ruze, if you think I see Gran or my mom or Ms. K – sorry, you lose. In Gran’s town, the streets don’t care if you are desperate or sad – the streets, like the dark houses, like the faraway sky, like the trees, do what they’re gonna do. They keep quiet. They keep calm – each intersection on auto-light: red, green, yellow. Stop, go, slow. Green, yellow, red, green. Go slow, stop, go back…or go home.
LJ Pemberton
I always hated that name, Brenda. It sounded too much like Rhonda, which was a name I hated too. You couldn’t make much of yourself with a name like that. You’d just end up melting American cheese for pasta over a gas burner, praying for next year to be better, while in the next room your son rubbed one out for the third time since getting home from school.
M.I. Estepa
Without a real prayer, Glo presses a quick kiss against Our Lady, eclipsing her stark face. Her lips get caked in dust.
Mahreen Sohail
When it was hot where you lived things boiled into you like a hatred for the sun or the constant need to be surrounded by air or water. I found myself doing things to combat the weather like for example coming out of the hotel shower on that first day and standing in the middle of the room breathing in and out, letting my body dry itself.
Marguerite Duras
It took a serious enough depression, lasting several months, for me to get past the first fifty pages of The Man Without Qualities…
Mari Christmas
At least Benny and I had our routine: We went to Sasha’s in the morning where I read about the Battle of Saratoga and cried all day. I felt like I would never meet another man as smart as Davis. I imagined him kneeling over the edge of the bed screaming at me in grammatically complex profanity. I didn’t want to become one of those people who fantasized about the past.
Maria Alejandra Barrios
Daniel, a guy I barely knew from university, said that I should stay in a local house so I could experience the “real” Colombia. I told him I was from Barranquilla.
Maria Lioutaia
Slide down to the floor, crouching against the bottom cupboards like you’re playing hide-and-seek. Chrome dishwasher opposite reflects a vague mucilaginous shape that you don’t recognize as human, much less as yourself.
Marian Ryan
She takes the U-Bahn across town to visit him where he is cat-sitting for friends. She carries a bag containing sunscreen, a T-shirt in case it gets warm, a book she fancies reading on the sofa while the cats drift from room to room.
Marianna Nash
We walk past the old tenement where Anya’s great-aunt still lives, claiming the hole she tore in the world. Imagine if we all moved into Columbia Presbyterian! Someone probably has.
Marissa Houston
You play the dressing game with your mother like this: every item of clothing in your closet and dresser drawers ends up on your bedroom floor.
Mark Galarrita
As I scrolled through my mentions, I wondered if Robbie was right. Why would anyone want to SWAT me though? I don’t talk smack, and I don’t harass anyone. There are gamer dudes who are famous because that’s all they do—yell at the camera and call gamers racial slurs. They make fun of people they don’t even know in real life. Like, what’s the point of that?
Mark L. Keats
Some of the vendors stood and smoked, some joked with one another, their laughter slowly dissipating in the night; others sat; still, a few looked as if they had fallen asleep. It was late, a little past 10:30pm. An older woman with tired eyes and a lot of makeup waved to him, offered him a pamphlet with words he couldn’t quite understand. She moved onto to another person, handed out another pamphlet. He read the Korean below: “Jesus Christ saves.”
Matt Rowan
She didn’t have many friends because she took things without asking, but she had me. I adored her.
Matthew Phillp
He was certain The Kid had pretended to be half asleep all the way home so he wouldn’t have to pay the cab fare, and to avoid him. He’d played along and not said anything, the whole time wanting like nothing he had wanted before to move his hand to touch The Kid’s but he had not and it had been humiliating to need that so much.
Matthew Torralba Andrews
Father Cleary was fully robed. He leant against the rear counter, facing the sacristy entrance with his arms folded across his chest, as if waiting for Benjie. Benjie knew he must have heard the sound. He averted his eyes and held the cracked chalice at his side, away from Father’s view.
Max Jack-Monroe
I chose Madeleine as a tribute to the city that I’ve called home for the past four years. Yes, as in the orphan pelirrojita in the old house covered with vines. And yes, as in one of those little French cakes that kind of look like duckbills.
Max Taxe
I have been barred from my local nursery, even from looking at the cute little succulents that are supposed to require less maintenance. I had to create multiple fake Reddit usernames to post pictures of withering plants and find out what ailed them so no intrepid internet sleuth could pin the mass genocide of local fauna on one person.
Matthew Fogarty
Plus, there was something so unexpectedly exciting about being together that we wanted to explore it without everybody watching. So we kept it quiet and, as I say, for two months, we’d been going strong.
Matthew Hooton
Of course I think of my childhood friend now, as I speed past the disused Bamberton Cement Plant, the northern edges of the Malahat pass levelling into this smooth stretch of Island Highway.
Matthew Lansburgh
Al gives me zero. All day long he sits glued to his armchair, drinking glass after glass of V-8 juice and making a mess with his crackers. The crumbs end up everywhere—the upholstery, the carpet, all over the little table he drags in front of the TV.
Melanie Manuel
Listen—Buffalo Bill has a secret. He’s dying.
Melissa Bull
At night we eat shepherd’s pie. At night we eat pasta with butter and pepper and salt. We eat frozen corn and feel the cold kernels burst in our mouths. The taste is unappealing but the squish is amazing.
Melissa Cundieff
The dog that bit me was a stray scavenging on the street; I was eight years old. After letting go of my mother’s hand to embrace the dog around its neck, I only remember a few details.
Melissa Moorer
They weren’t hippies, they were monkeys. I went downstairs to get a soda and they were attacking the vending machines.
Melissa Ragsly
After the disaster, we were shuttled in busses to the elementary school. We were a soft-footed herd. They turned us towards the entrance, combating the mass distraction of our frozen thoughts. We were demagnetized compasses, nothing but spinning needles.
Michele Lombardo
T. rex roared, eyes flicking about in short, rapid movements consistent with a predator possessing heightened sensory abilities. It paused before us, head hovering fifteen feet above. It screamed, teeth long like fingers. Cassidy and I reflexively cowered, then laughed.
Michelle Ruiz Keil
Witches and wannabes, way too many drugs. Day three without sleep and you’re psychotic for real. Then it’s like the song—we’re waiting for our man.
Michelle Syba
Winston closes his eyes and listens to his belly gurgle.
Mika Taylor
She planted a single seed in each of his ears while he slept, tweezing in the first, then waiting patiently for him to turn. They weren’t seeds she could readily identify, mustard or melon, maple or rye. They were small and oblong, smooth at the edges, promising.