Category: Fiction
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BLOODY AVENUE by Isabella Jetten
I’ve been followed around by a younger version of myself since I was sixteen. She wears a pink cotton dress, white, buckled sandals, and a Ghostface mask she cycles blood through using a piping mechanism in her left hand, making the white face drip red. As we trudge down Inkberry Avenue, I ignore the breath-like…
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WET OR DRY by Naomi Silverman
It’s raining, and I’m in my car because there’s somewhere for me to go. The sound is nice for me, and nice for my car. She purrs, and I purr back to her. It’s funny that I describe us this way—we are going to get my cat. She’ll be my cat now, although she has…
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THE LEAST AMERICAN FACE by M. Y. Li
The event is in thirty minutes. You don’t really know what it is. The leader of your Erasmus group said something in Spanish about a trip to a traditional Moroccan venue. But did he say the place is a restaurant or a themed bar? Your Spanish isn’t great, but it’s good enough to make out…
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MEMORY FIELDS by Liz Howey
The orchard is beautiful. Meets the postcard standard of picturesque, as promised. Lines of foliage haloed by the rising sun, shades of green and brown and golden red, and for a second Maggie slips, imagines her and Brendon and a child that won’t exist. A little girl—no, a boy, a little arrogant boy, a mini-Brendon.…
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VERDIGRIS by Mariana Sabino
Four years had passed since I returned to this building, the old city, and the old job. At work digitizing the poster of another Czech New Wave film—this one depicting algae sprouting from a woman’s head, dark eyes sparkling with silver pin lights that reminded me of plankton—my heart started racing so fast I handed…
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ASHES by Nandita Naik
The river Ganga seethes with ashes. We shove our elbows into each other’s sides, muscle our way in to look. The bodies of our grandmothers and grandfathers burn on the cremation ghats. We watch them become less like bodies and more like a collection of burning fabric and bone marrow and veins turning into ash.…
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DON’T CALL ME YOUR PRINCESS by Megan Culhane Galbraith
Once upon a time, there was a young girl who lost her mother too soon. Cinderella’s grief was bottomless. Every day she visited her mother’s grave. “Where is my great love?” she asked. One day her mother answered. “Cinder, dear, your great love is inside you. You must be yourself, for it is only then…
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MONTHLY: Fiction Editors Emeritae
GIRLS OF LEAST IMPORTANCE by K.K. Fox K.K. Fox lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse, NELLE, Joyland, Kenyon Review Online, and others. She is a fiction editor for Los Angeles Review. THE LUCKY ONES by Hananah Zaheer Hananah Zaheer’s writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review,…
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GIRLS OF LEAST IMPORTANCE by K.K. Fox
It wasn’t like you think. Charlie Todd was one of the most popular candidates going through Rush that year, even with a limp and a useless hand. We tried not to stare, but her left arm was lifeless, paralyzed, and her hand curled at the end like a comma. She hit her head in a…
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THE LUCKY ONES by Hananah Zaheer
Ever since Abba died, a girl has been living in my mouth. Mostly, she sits on my tongue and watches me do my homework or make houses with old cereal boxes. When Amma makes me write receipts for the laundry business she runs out of our living room, the girl helps me count. “I want…
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MONSIEUR REYNARD by Holly M. Wendt
Renaud com richchande thurgh a roghe greveAnd alle the rabel in a res, ryght at his heles.— “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by anonymous but what is the fox to think, duck-tumbling through green with all the dogs baying at his heels, of the scene unfolding across a hill inside stone walls much…
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ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS SWIM by Jon Bohr Heinen
I ducked down a side street when I saw the red and blue lights coming from the police cruisers blocking the Burnside Bridge. My big brother, Joel, trailed after me and asked, What’re you doing? I told him I’d never seen so many cops before; the only policeman I’d encountered was the one who visited…