by O Thiam Chin

The boy was told not to touch anything. And so far, he hadn’t touched anything he wasn’t curious about in the two rooms he had walked into. The flat was messy and stuffed with many things that he hadn’t seen before, objects and curios that were old and yellowed and sticky and dusty. Things on top of other things, towers built to reach the ceiling, to hold up the walls.

by David C. Metz

They were children of the Great Depression, taught loyalty to family by their Catholic mother, a lesson Maggie had absorbed. Now, thirty years later, she looked at her brother Bill across the oval dining room table—short and thickset with an aura that made him appear bigger than he was, sleeves of his white shirt rolled past his elbows, thick fingers pressed to his temples—and decided it was time to make coffee.

by Ruth Farmer

She knew she had died because she could feel everyone smiling. She felt the blood in the air, could smell it oozing off her, leaking from her arteries, the pumping having stopped long ago.

by Nathan Geeting

As the hell-hot summer blistered on, Tommy died again and again. He and Simon had started playing war in the woods behind their homes, near the pond and mosquitos. Simon always led the missions since, as he explained, it was his grandpa’s stories they were reenacting, but they used their collective imagination to fill in the details that were, apparently, “too much” for nine-year-olds.

by Jennifer Anne Moses

Rabbi Abramovich had a problem. He knew he had a problem, too—how well acquainted he was with the yetzer ha ra!

by Stephen J. Wallace

“Are you sure you want me to poke out his other eye? He seems to be pretty subdued already,” I asked, wiping the egg white substance and blood from the sharp end of my prodding staff. Delilah didn’t say a word but slowly turned her head and glared.

by Chad Holley

My friend John is leaving LA. I had not heard from him in well over a year, maybe two, definitely pre-pandemic, when I saw him calling a couple of weeks back, mid-morning, on my fortieth.

by Katy Carl

When Bub’s father picked him up from school in the new silver commuter car with the sunroof, he said they were going to drive over to the boy's grandmother's house in the next county.

by A. G. Harmon

It is only five-thirty in the morning when Amelia rises. Not having rested well for days— a few tattered hours of fitful drowsing, interrupted by confusing dreams—she might have remained in bed longer to erase the deficit.

by Laura Huey Chamberlain

Turns out my fairy godmother has issues of her own, and my boyfriend spent the early evening of my fifty-third birthday staunching a tiny knife-wound she inflicted on his neck.