Tag: Fiction
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THE HEART OF A SIREN by Margo Rejmer, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
From the recent collection The Burden of Skin. The sea was groaning like a wounded beast. Is the sea hungry? Or thirsty? Is it afraid? Dawn was slipping through holes in the thin curtains. Lying in bed, Enriko began to make out the contours of objects. He listened to the sea. It was calling…
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SPLIT UNIT by Ryan Bender-Murphy
For so long, the first thing I’d see in the morning was Gabby, her head against the pillow, and it was enough to complete the day. I didn’t need to look at anyone else or go anywhere else; I could simply go back to sleep. But whenever I woke and saw her, I thought I…
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ONCE, THERE WAS HOME, by Karla Hirsch
once, there was time, there were moments that made up your life, there were hours and minutes, a morning’s routine, the bitter coffee you brewed in the copper pot you had longer than you could remember, mixed the hot liquid with sugar and spices, let it fill you awake to prepare you to journey to…
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OCTOBER MONTHLY: Interview with Salvatore Pane
We’re excited to share a new series of interviews exploring craft. In these conversations, we’ve asked writers to take us behind the scenes of their finished works, showing us the process behind the poem, the scene, and the story. Last month, we spoke with Jessica E. Johnson, on her memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on…
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THE JUNIPER 3 by Trudy Lewis
No one even remembered our dad’s sad song until Tate brought it back on TikTok. The angst and the ecstasy. The emo vocals and the math rock chord progressions. The long and whining bridge between curt, accusatory verses. My mother killed me My father ate me My sister gathered up my bones I’d heard it…
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FALL FOR IT by Claire Hopple
After they escort us out, we are told to wait here. The here being a square of sidewalk. If you could see the two of us on this sidewalk square. Trying to maintain appearances. It’s a delicate operation. A heavy quiet. Some convenience store employees switch off who gets to peer out the window at…
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GIFTS by Samantha Neugebauer
Marie and Ms. Simpkin’s unexpected meeting on the park’s northwest corner got their lunch off to a bad start. Neither felt quite ready to commit themselves to conversation, yet what else could they do? They would need to proceed around the gated park and down Irving Place together as if the ten minutes of solitude…
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MOTH by Cary Holladay
Augustus Gwynn: Gus Gwynn, drop-dead handsome, running on hot. When he was forty, wrecked and ruined, he was irresistible. The problem, he said, is I’m in my head all the time. Women loved that. And he always looked like he’d just killed somebody. They loved that too. So, his mother. When he was forty, they…
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WHITE FLAG by Leah Browning
She wanted to be like Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8, beautiful and world-weary, but it seemed that Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was more her style: half in the bag and walking around the kitchen late at night eating a cold chicken leg with the refrigerator door hanging open. She, too, had…
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HEARTWOOD by Rose Skelton
On the day after Hazel died – it was a Tuesday afternoon in early March – George stood at his woodworking bench, whittling a bowl. He pressed the piece of yew down, and used a bowl gouge to scoop a smooth sliver of the pinkish-white wood so that it curled upwards and away, falling…