by Emily Strempler
“I know you’re proud,” the teacher says, stopping in the hall to deliver this gem of wisdom as she passes, “but I’d be a little quieter about it, if I were you. Boys don’t like girls who are too smart. Trust me.”
Read More »by Chey Dugan
I was admiring the aristocratic Grande Dame portrait on a Tuesday afternoon; a day when the Abruzzo Museum of Art History is hauntingly inactive and I’m free from the perturbed looks I get from the usual late-week crowd. I’m reluctant to admit, but somewhere along my embryonic development my Pavlovian wires got crossed and because of these ritual Tuesdays, I could just exist in my oddity. I would thank myself at the end of the week for getting this out of my system.
I was deep within myself and sure I was alone until you interrupted and said, I like what you’re doing with your face.
Read More »by Kylie Wang
Boom.
The creatures in the underbrush scattered as another tree fell, her arms cracking when she hit the ground. The giant had stood tall and proud despite— or rather because of— her age, with her leaf-crowned head facing up to drink in the sunlight, but that didn’t change the way she keeled over and collided with the forest floor: heavy, like a vault door slammed shut.
Read More »by Dave Nash
I saw you waiting at the front of the platform, I inched up closer. I hung behind the other commuters who allowed me anonymity. I strained for a better look.
I saw you on a good day, a lucid moment from my ennui; yesterday I would have put my head in my phone and waited for the train to pull in.
Read More »by Cecilia Kennedy
When the kya, kya, he, he, shoosh, shoosh labor-breathing ended, a tiny thing entered this world on a string. Nurses had to pull her down from the ceiling. I never even got a chance to hold her.
“It’s rare,” the doctors said, “but it happens,” and they rattled off something about the displacement of oxygen in a pair of human lungs and chromosomes and genes and splices of things, but in the end, the outcome was clear: my child would float through the world.
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