Jennifer Dickinson No One’s Darling Etta puts on her pink dress with the slit up the skirt. Lipstick. Powder. Mascara. Rhinestone earrings. Her fur coat. If she’s going to have an audience, she has to look her best. The blonde…
Browsing: Fiction
Breena Clarke Mama Ascended I have communicated with those who would know. Mama and Papa and Harold and Alice were welcomed in the afterlife, following their harrowing deaths. Their souls were luminous. They said that Mama ascended in the…
Melissa Coss Aquino Visions of the Mother We Need (excerpt from the novel Carmen and Grace) We put the holy water on our foreheads in the sign of the cross from the small marble basin at the entrance, as if…
Naomi J. Williams No Doors When they had been stuck indoors for a very long time, the children asked if they could play outside, just for a little while, and the mother relented because she wanted to be alone for…
Muriel’s Cyclone Kathy Fish It begins with a snowman who catches Muriel’s eye. It begins with Muriel standing at the drawing room window of her tiny home. The winter cyclones, once rare, are now common, fierce as lions. But…
The Return Tara Laskowski Our child was there, and then she wasn’t. A reverse birth, if you will. She was there, and then she went back inside, back to the lava-lamp-like existence, floating, warm, head upside down and skin…
Sparrow Mary McLaughlin Slechta Juanetta passed the abandoned house every year since third grade and paid it no mind. She didn’t pass close because now she was in high school, she walked in the street. But one afternoon, when…
Giving Up on the Professor Julia Strayer Most of us live underground now, which is fine by me. Under the city, under the streets, because that’s the only place safe for now. Scorching temps and fast fires left…
When Words Clung to Paper Dawn Raffel The water rose slowly at first and then in a rush. This had happened so often that now we evacuated quickly, with maximum efficiency: children in hand, the papers stating our identity,…
Honesty Sherrie Flick The steam rises, it’s a choir rubbing up my fat belly, then swirling to a hallelujah at the ceiling. Thirty-six weeks. I’m an island of flesh in this clawfoot tub. The water laps at me each…