Laura TanenbaumIN-LAWS “In five years, I’m going to fall in love with a fish,” the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. “They will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will…
Meredith McCarrollDARK MATTER “You know how dark matter is like the absence of space, but it, like, takes up space?” “OK.” “Well, what if dark matter could be contained and it’s like an anti-gravity solution. In a gas form. It…
Dawn MillerTHE EGG Third Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition “The Egg” is a story of conjugal love gone rotten. In this frightening study of betrayal, the author’s fine use of startling and original metaphor is something that knocked me out.…
K. T. MooreWHALE CRATERS “Had one come down overnight.” Eden was waiting for him in the car park. Tayne felt himself sweating by the time he reached her, and as the wind kicked up, a shiver started between his shoulder…
Christina SimonSAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR My first horse, a palomino mare; horse shows from Del Mar to San Francisco; high school when possible; ran from the red-haired, freckle-faced bully who called out oreo, zebra, half-breed, fucking mulatto; pretended his blows…
Ron TobeyYOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS The annual flood of green from West Virginia’s vast Appalachian forest drubs me senseless. I feel lightheaded. I check my Fitbit. Why does my blood oxygen level drop? My mortality, I wonder. At midnight, the rain…
Janet BurrowayTHE TALE OF MOLLY GRIMM Second Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition This story is the one I kept rereading because it stuck to my brain. I thought I had finished with it and then it pulled me back into…
Theo GreenblattTHE PERSON FALLING HERE The drink is called a Cape Codder, he tells me. Vodka and cranberry juice, two ingredients; too simple to warrant a cocktail name, I think. Cranberries are grown in bogs, he explains, and Cape Cod…
Fannie H. GrayINCENDIES On our honeymoon, I never even noticed an acrid smell. The langoustines, the salade gourmande, the tartare de boeuf, the shimmering, perspiring glasses of sublime rosé, all served with the efficient careless attention which is inherently French.…
Sabrina HicksWHEN WE KNEW HOW TO GET LOST First Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition This story bursts with tragic urgency and it simply stuck to my heart. The author builds a feeling about a young love relationship from the inside…
Andrew StancekPEACOCKS The show we are not watching is on Buddhism. Your hand dips absently into the plastic bowl of Colonel Redenbacher’s; my ketchup chips are long gone. The Knicks are playing the Lakers, but I don’t suggest switching the…
Nonfiction by Erin Langner & Sarah Fawn Montgomery, reviewed by Beth KephartTETHER AND FLOAT: THOUGHTS ON TWO NEW ESSAY COLLECTIONS: SOUVENIRS FROM PARADISE (ZONE 3 PRESS) & HALFWAY FROM HOME (SPLIT/LIP PRESS) What would happen if, when we thought about…
Fiction by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), reviewed by Aalia JagwaniHERmione (New Directions) When I started reading HERmione, I knew nothing about Hilda Doolittle, the American modernist poet better known as H.D. But although intensely personal and grounded in an endlessly fascinating…
Fiction by T.M. Blanchet, reviewed by Jae SuttonHERRICK’S END (Tiny Fox Press) Born and raised in Boston, mostly by his mother—who is loved by everyone she meets—Ollie Delgato has had to endure multiple hardships. But he has a plan. At…
Nonfiction by Joanna Ho, reviewed by Kristie GadsonTHE SILENCE THAT BINDS US (HarperCollins) Danny Chen is a basketball phenom who loves watching the Star Wars trilogy and singing, albeit off-key, Sam Smith’s song “Lay Me Down.” He enjoys eating burgers…
Fiction by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, reviewed by Dylan Cook A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST (New Directions) It would be fair to say that there’s only…
Interview by Will HuberdeauLucian Mattison on his new poetry collection Curare (C&R Press) Will: Starting with the title, what does “curare” mean to you? I had to Google it and got a variety of definitions and explanations. How did you…
Interview by Claire Olesonemet ezell on their debut poetry chapbook, Between Every Bird, Our Bones (Newfound) Claire: This book gives us bite-sized poems in paragraph-like vignettes. What drew you to this form, this body, for your language? emet: In BETWEEN…
Nonfiction by Clarice Lispector, translated by Margaret Jull Costa & Robin Patterson, reviewed by Dylan Cook TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS (New Directions) A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality.…
Hannah Felt GarnerFIRST CHOICE It is fall break when we arrive on campus for the interview. No one around but the student workers in Admissions and a security guard in a golf cart, silently cruising under heritage elms. My father…
Alison SandersEIGHTEEN I hear her in the shower. There’s a gulping sound like she’s drinking straight from the faucet, or she’s trying to but she can’t keep up because the water is coming way too fast. It sounds like she’s…
Emma BrankinMARILYN MONROE LETS THE LIVESTOCK IN When her husband tells her no, you can’t invite the wet, bedraggled cow caught in the rainstorm into their house overnight, Norma Jean kicks him out. She’s had enough—why are decisions something other…
Interview by Emily HusoIN WHICH LIFE?: A Conversation with Chauna Craig, author WINGS AND OTHER THINGS (Press 53) Chauna Craig’s second story collection, Wings and Other Things, speculates about the possibilities that exist beyond fear, self-doubt, and patriarchal control. Most…
Dan ShieldsA BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA Earlier in the day, before the ambulance whisked me off school grounds, I crawled under my desk during recess, untucked my shirt, and squeezed my skin as hard as I could. I…
Michelle BittingFOR PHIL All day we’ve bent like Benedictine monks over armoires and bookshelves, rubbing the house clean of grime and wicked thick dust, pausing but once to drop our robes and oil each other bright as snakes entwined in…
Candice MorrowMELT A record high, the porch thermometer reads one hundred and nine, and your father sleeps naked without even a sheet. You left for college yesterday, and I suppose this means, among other things, that we can sprawl exposed…
Josh KrigmanENOUGH FISH The important thing was whether she had enough fish. Rose stared at the open refrigerator, its fluorescent-lit innards threatening to overflow. Stacks of plastic containers and tinfoil-covered dishes formed a towering puzzle without a single piece missing.…
Andrew Vincenzo LorenzenHOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE YOUR ASHES ARE EVERYWHERE. You don’t know how to smoke a cigar. I’m going to teach you tonight. I shouldn’t—but I will. Here, hold it like this, see? Between your thumb and index…
Devon RaymondDEBT OF A DAUGHTER A man who is your father tricks you into believing that there is no price to pay for being his favorite—that you are free to accept all of his attention, and presents, and praise. So…
Varun ShettyO It is a circle, a cipher, the opposite of something. It is formed by an old man’s lips parted midbreath. It is an absence held in the valley of his mouth. It is unmoved even with an endotracheal…
Beth KephartHOW ARE YOU? An Antonym Story If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned. How are you? Well… How are you? Just a— How are…
Jeff FriedmanTWO MICROFICTIONS PET PIRANHAS Jess and I loved to watch our pet piranhas swim back and forth, weaving through the lush greens in our aquarium. Though we had seen the James Bond movie in which a pool of piranhas…
Alison LubarGRAND SLAM Tacoma WA, 1939 Jack takes a baseball bat to the river. August spawning season. …………….The dry rocktops steam like the belly of a monster cut open. …………….Unlaces right boot, then left, pulls them off without sitting and…
Amy SavageHAUNTING VIVIAN The first ex to haunt Vivian waits until she’s left her bar stool to use the restroom. On return, she finds his embossed business card cowering next to her martini, the bumpy letters of his name like…
Kim MagowanFAVOR Liam, Emailing because I just heard that you and Genevieve split up, so I wanted to reach out and say—well, I was going to say how sorry I am. But that isn’t entirely truthful. At any rate, I’m…
Suphil Lee ParkOFF You wake up in complete darkness. It is the kind of darkness that strikes you as a jolt of realization that you’ve never found yourself in complete darkness up until that very moment, not that terrifying night…
Phil Keeling34 FEET The gun was small and snub-nosed. It looked heavy, though, attached to the lanky arm of my mugger. Imagine it. Me! With my very own personal mugger. Because in that moment, he was mine and I was…
Madeleine GavalerZOLOFT NANNY Red drips down Dasha’s chin as I watch her through the playground bars. I hold my phone a distance from my cheek, giving my voice air to wade through before making its way to some faraway woman…
Lydia DowneySHOOTING BUCK Peeking around the cliff, I meet my father’s eyes. The horizon’s glowing haze & morbid curiosity as I stretch my palm over the Tetons to haul the buck back to safety from the metal clicks of huddled…
John SchneiderTHAW Still burdened with winter’s whiteness ………….and the darkness of prolonged nights, we gaze out at our world through glazed windows. ………….This is the time of year for crusted glass, cold reflections. Again, my aging eyes ………….look back at…
Emily ParzybokAN EASIER STORY Around the time I had an abortion, the bathroom drain gave up entirely. For months, the drain had been slow-moving. I’d find myself in an inch of water at the end of a shower, shaking my…
Mandira PattnaikCENTER OF AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Place in Fiction Recently, while compiling my short stories and flash fiction for a possible collection, I was surprised by how many of those stories were based in the culture and climate markers of…
Fiction by Kim Fu, reviewed by Prisha Mehta LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (Tin House Books) A customer seeks out advanced simulation technology to recreate a conversation with her dead mother, but is refused on the grounds that…
Fiction by Kyle Lucia Wu, reviewed by Annie Cao WIN ME SOMETHING (Tin House) In Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu’s enthralling debut novel, Willa Chen is a biracial Chinese-American girl who starts a nannying job for the Adriens, a…
Coco Mellors, reviewed by Stephanie Fluckey CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN (Bloomsbury) I was attracted to the novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein because the title characters and I share something in common: a short courtship followed by elopement. In Coco Mellors’s debut novel,…
Nonfiction by William Turner, reviewed by Jamie Tews The Harlan Renaissance (West Virginia University Press) When I read William Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, I was living in Appalachia, commuting between Eastern Kentucky…
Francine WitteDRUNKDADDY Punches a hole in the cakey window. The hole is the size of a woman’s head. My mother’s head. Tells the window, good, now you are broken, too. Blames the window for being so gooked up with grime…
Mimi YangA LETTER FROM MY FATHER TO ME My mother asked me to kill a spider, so I take her body out into the rice fields and I let the millet swell up beneath me in a furious roar. A…
Matt ThomasPOP SONG These eggs that I wash every morning before tucking them into the carton remind me of washing my daughter no less carefully, with an eye to the future knowing her cost and improbability. Like stroking a pocket…
Tess KellyPLAYHOUSE It arrived on a surprise Saturday in the bed of Uncle Tony’s pickup. The wooden playhouse our grandfather built had cedar shakes, a rooster-topped weathervane, and real hinged windows that opened wide like our astonished mouths. Soon enough…