THE VIEW FROM HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS

By Ted McLoof

Sandy Fisher’s backpack had patches on it that said things like Kill All Fascists and Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. She wore thrift-store jeans and Che Guevara t-shirts before they were mass-produced by Urban Outfitters a few years later. Her father was an adjunct history professor at Bergen Community College, the next town over, and her mother had died when she was a kid, I’m not sure how. She carried a copy of A People’s History of the United States with her wherever she went.

FORGIVE ME IF I’M RAMBLING, THIS IS ME ON WEED - A HUMAN MEETS A MOUSE

By Mercia Kandukira

The mouse next door knew instinctively that I was me while I was oblivious of his existence.

I smoked a week old blunt I’d gotten form the one African American woman I know. I sat in the wood behind our house where a dead tree turned to a bench after that winter storm we had at the end of spring.

THE OVERVIEW EFFECT

By Dara Israel

The first time I saw a dead body in the wild was on the L train in lower Manhattan. It was midday, mid week, mid summer - crowded, busy, sweaty, loud. I was crammed on the 6th Avenue platform with a coworker and countless anonymous bodies. Our collective sweat created a thick humidity that hung in the air with the stench of warm pee, rotting garbage, and gasoline - New York in the summer is magical. We could be waiting 2 minutes or 20 minutes - one could never really be sure - for the hopefully air conditioned train to roll into the platform to our rescue. My coworker and I still had another 4 hours of shooting ahead of us - a mayonnaise commercial or something like it - to which we would certainly be late if the train did not show up very soon.

HOW MARY POPPINS STOPPED BEING GOD

By Michelle Munoz

 Mary Poppins wore a tailored tux and a tall top hat when she was God. The umbrella she usually carried in the film was gone. Instead, she paraded around with a black cane that shot lightning when pointed in a particular direction. She still had Julie Andrews’ face but talked in a deep baritone voice on occasion—she was usually silent. She smelled like freshly squeezed orange juice and wore bright red lipstick. She had soft, feminine hands that fit perfectly into mine.

I saw Mary Poppins frequently as a child. I saw her in my dreams, when I looked up at the sky for too long, in my mother’s fresh laundry, in a puddle of ice cream that melted from a summer’s day, in my sister’s slanted laugh, in my bruised knees after recess, in a bowl of cookie batter on Christmas Eve, in chlorine-filled pool water that made my eyes burn, in a box of freshly sharpened crayons, in every tantrum I ever threw.

THE HAUNTING OF THE JALAPENO PEPPER

By Hannah Meyer

During my tenure as a former heterosexual, I considered myself an expert in men. I could drink my weight in IPA and discuss anything from analytical philosophy to 1930s car radiators. I’ve mastered the nod of affirmation for when men would mansplain the female orgasm to me while we were having sex, and I even taught my ex how to “love himself again’ after he was rejected by the woman that he cheated on me with. And honestly, I liked some of the men I dated, but sometimes I thought, is this REALLY all there is?

SPODS, ANTI-NATALISM, AND THE FLEETING MEN

By Monty Rozema

I’m sitting in Diva Espresso with a hangover, not from drinking, but from being alive. Madonna’s Like A Virgin is playing and a baby in a stroller is making extended and deeply personal eye contact with me. Wedged between the table and the wall I found an evangelical pamphlet, and I am now rubbing it gently between my thumbs and forefingers. Free From Fear, it is titled. Underneath: What is Fear? The Fear of God. The Fear of the Future. The Fear of Failure. The Fear of Suffering. The Fear of Death.

THE INEVITABILITY OF SPRING AND THE HELLISH BUGS IT BRINGS WITH IT

By Joseph Edwin Haeger

My back door has a small gap at the bottom. It’s an opening the naked eye can’t distinguish when carrying as many bags of groceries as humanly possible inside. It’s not even big enough for a dandelion seed to drift and float under. Year after year I assumed the door was perfectly flush with the frame—not too big where it’d scrap against the floor and not too small where a draft would sweep into our house, freezing the soft green pea soup in our kitchen.

YOU ARE YOUNG AND RADIANT AND STUPID

By HC 

Calla flies in from Long Beach, where she tends bars intermittently. She sleeps on a blow-up mattress in the meditation room. She brings two carry-ons, one for clothes and the other for make-up. She’s very beautiful, and almost my age. I can see myself with her. I thought she’d be older, Jenny’s age. An indeterminate and cancer-ravaged sixty, like Jenny. Missing an eye and her sense of smell and her ability to chew and swallow properly, like Jenny. I live in Jenny’s attic in Akron, Ohio, and Calla lives in Jenny’s rental property in Long Beach, California. Calla is Jenny’s niece. I’m nobody.

BODY/HORROR

By Kellina Moore

I wrote the story because I didn’t know where else to hide the bodies. My insides are dusted with the crushed-up bones of girls, and the coating is getting too thick. Every time I breathe I choke. Girlbones caught on the roof of my mouth like powdered sugar. I don’t know how to carry all that death in me every day, in line at the grocery store reeking of rotted flesh, so I decided to write a story where I could keep them locked up in the little white spaces between the words, a girl graveyard.

Maybe I could write my way to their killer, too, find out who fed them to me like pills to a cat, clamping my mouth closed and stroking my throat with their hand to make it go down easy. So I wrote the story, and the story was this:

IN CASE I LOSE MY FOOTING

By Devon Mello

Billy lost a toe in the fall. They sent a letter to families before the start of swim lessons, I guess they wanted to get a head start on any questions or conversations about it. The thing is though, all they mentioned was that Billy lost a toe over the summer (his pinky toe on his left foot) but there was no mention of how it happened, or if we could talk about it. Just that it happened and Billy might be a little self conscious about it.

A DAY

By Austin Horn

He stepped out from under the dryness of the prefabricated storefront and into the wet, sticky Georgia summer. A faded brown flannel shirt clung to him, while his new sneakers barely found traction on the slick cement. The cigarette he lit was snuffed out by the rain with a faint sizzle.

EVEN THOUGH SHE HAD

 By James Morena

My Jeep Cherokee rumbled along I-25. It high-pitched whistled from the tiny hole in its roof that had formed from rust and neglect. I had on my shatter-proof sunglasses, steel-toe boots, and ball cap. I was cruising - gangster rap blaring from my radio, burger and fries warming my lap - when the text snuck in.

FOR CRYING

By Rhonda Zimlich

I see a bowl of Cheerios covered in a layer of sugar. The cereal has been sitting in the milk so long the Os have expanded and the sugar has turned to a wet, grey paste. The cereal is mine. I sit at the table in my t-shirt and underwear and I cry for reasons I cannot remember. But I cry all the time at this age. I hear explanations like, she’s just sensitive, or, she’s a weepy kid. My childhood is marked by red, swollen eyes and a raspy voice.

DARIA & PETE

By HLR

I would enquire, would ask exactly how they all met, but all the members of this party are now dead.

1999-ish.

 Father took us to Woolworths on the Holloway Road. Brother and I filled up a paper bag with pick ‘n’ mix and accidentally (?) walked out of the store without paying for it.

SAYING SOMETHING

By Andrea Lara-Garcia

I.                

I AM SITTING ON A DARK MEXICAN BEACH, EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, AND I FEEL BEAUTIFUL AND DRUNK

So you are hot and young, and surrounded by so many other hot and young people, and you think that this is the meaning of life—to be hot and young.

CHICKEN NUGGETS AND WORM MEAT

By D.S. Davis

I’m sitting outside Bunce Hall waiting for you to get out of class so we can head home. This is when my Volvo is in its dying days and it looks like it’s been driving on borrowed time anyway. I’ve been driving this damn thing since we were juniors in high school. I finally replaced the driver’s seatbelt a month or so ago. There are two bent rims in the trunk and one of them is my spare so I’m fucked if I get another flat. Every other panel is dented including the one from when you got jumped in the parking lot in high school and smashed Keith’s head into the hood. Worse of all, the car shakes something violent if it goes above forty-five which will eventually dislodge the engine enough to finally kill the car. I always thought it was invincible, but I guess everything eventually dies. The air-conditioning doesn’t work, but it’s October 15th, so the heat will cut through the cold autumn air without a problem.

HILARY SWANK & SPEEDING CARS

 By G.T. Gordon

When we were eleven and almost asleep, the headlights from cars going south would interrogate the contents of your room. A swift and blinding light would sweep from one side to the next through the big window facing the driveway as cars turned onto your street. You snored quietly next to me. Your gauzy curtains welcomed the glare as I burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag with the plaid interior and broken zipper.

DISNEY’S MAGICAL NIGHTMARE

 By Melissa Moy

I sit under a tree, on the brick of the flower bed that encompasses it, in the cool escape of the shade next to the Magic Kingdom Dumbo ride a mere fifteen Februarys after I had stopped being a child. I can remember the moment as if it had just transpired.

ON COLLAGEN AND CREATIVITY

By Britny Kutuchief

When you’re about to turn 30, women tell you stories about waking up on the first day of their third decade as if they just shot up from a week-long nightmare, a surgery where, before they were rolled into the operating room, everybody said “it’ll be over before you know it.” They emerged from their droopy-eyed fever dream overcome with deep despair, shell-shocked and panting, collagen zapped from their cells. Old.

TRUE LIST OF THINGS I BELIEVED AS A CHILD, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

By Carolyn R. Russell

Ronald McDonald owned and operated hamburger restaurants all across the country, the most successful clown in the world.

Price tags on store items were arbitrary. If the number on the tag didn’t correspond to the amount of money in your pocket, it was your job to find one that was appropriately marked and switch them.

If, when riding your bike around the city, you needed the bathroom, you could knock on any door; they had to let you in to use theirs. By law.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GIRL IN CLASS WHO SAID, “OH, SO THAT’S WHY YOU’RE SO FUNNY” WHEN I TOLD HER I’VE HAD TWO DOGS DIE AT A YOUNG AGE:

By Laura Hernandez

Dear Girl in Class (Whose name I am keeping private for your sake and because I can’t exactly remember how you spell it), This should be more about you, unpacking why you decided to tell me that and why you thought your timing was appropriate (coming back to school after my second dog had died), but this will probably be more about me.

TRAVEL SPOTLIGHT: 48 HOURS IN MY RURAL VIRGINIA HOMETOWN

By Jessica McCaughey’s

Day One: Morning. Like most small towns in the south, this one has a very old diner that that smells like cigarettes even though smoking hasn’t been legal in restaurants in a really long time. Perfect for breakfast! Try to choose a booth with an operational mini-juke box, and bring cash, as they don’t take cards. Seriously. Even though it’s 2020. Afternoon Main Street in Old Town is the heart of any trip here, and that hasn’t changed with the closing of a staggering number of small businesses in the past few years. Pretend it’s not a Subway in that centuries-old building with the gorgeous windows. Wander the lawn of the historic hotel where the high school still holds their prom.

IF I DIED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MY FIRST QUESTION FOR GOD WOULD’VE BEEN, “WHAT’S MY NEIGHBOR’S DOG’S NAME?”

By Anissa Lynne Johnson

Almost every day, after I ate a snack, chugged a glass of green Kool-Aid, and finished my homework, I shot hoops with my dad in the driveway.  Oftentimes, we played Pig, which was really just my dad’s not-so-secret method of making me practice more difficult shots like 3-pointers or alley-oops. I never won.

LAIRD

By Sam Bickford

Laird Hamilton is a guy that looks exactly like a guy named Laird Hamilton should look. Blond hair: quaffed but still messy. He struts. He poses.

 He’s got a definitively he-man fridge and freezer (by this I mean his fridge and freezer are stocked with foods that help someone look like an action figure). One would think a man this macho is primordial (like he’s the missing link between humans and whatever we were before humans), that he would spawn out of some kind of swamp of muck and bog and bootstraps, but that is wrong. A he-man is created through intensity and focus and diet. So says Laird. He is so burly and granite chinned because he’s intense. He focuses on waves.

TROLL

By Jade Hidle

It started with prayer. 

I shadowed my mother around the temple through incense smoke and whispers to ancestors. That’s what the monk who’d read my mother’s palms at 19 called me--her shadow. He’d mapped out everything from my father’s stooped shoulders to her eventual death. There I was, in those creases and chains, following. 

ERIE

By Dan Morey

Flies swarmed over blood smears on the deck. They buzzed in our ears and bit us all over. We shook them off, spun them off, danced them off. When we couldn’t take it anymore, he fired up the motor and said, "Reel ’em in."

The propeller chewed the lake. Wind scoured the deck and the flies scattered. We took her out to 70 feet, then started to drift.

CONFESSIONS FROM THE LADY IN BLUE

By Jamilla D. VanDyke-Bailey

Just before midnight on May 1st, 2013, my best friend, Dina*, and her same-age uncle, Tommy*, dropped me off at my mother's house and I was vibrating through my skin with a high only a good movie could give. Although I was ambivalent to the book during high school and hated the long and white reimaginings on film, I couldn't miss a Leonardo DiCaprio film, with a soundtrack produced by Jay Z; even if it had ol' nobody do nothing, Toby Maguire.

MILLION-DOLLAR MISTAKE

By Sydney Bollinger

 Grab a torch and get fire. In this game, fire represents your life. Once your fire’s out, so are you. Jeff Probst begins the first tribal council in every season of Survivor with these words, adding a layer of existential metaphor to what is commonly considered a silly reality TV show. Despite its reputation, I watch it religiously, devouring season after season. My friends poke fun at my vested interest because my love for the show contrasts with my character as someone who spends their spare time watching Italian horror films from the 1970s and art house darlings.

FEAR INVENTORY

By Emma Newman-Holden

Glossophobia: I’m very smart with my big words, like epiglottic vallecula and lingual frenulum, and I’m very forgetful with my small words, like please and thank you. And when is it appropriate to say bless you after someone sneezes and when should you remain silent? You can’t know someone’s name unless you ask, but my mother exhorts, like a needle jabs into a nerve, do not speak unless spoken to. Swallowing my words so many times in between slices of spit so people turn to stare at my agape mouth which, to their surprise, reveals a slit tongue. My mind is always melting, and even when it’s not, my mother is always stabbing the needle. Are mutilated mouths not comforting? The space between us is clotted with lines of speech, not mine of course, that have become twisted and muddled. But no one has told me their name yet.

THE LAUNDROMAT

By Emily Anne Standlee

The white guy at the laundromat speaks Spanish and reminds me of Ryan, my ex-boyfriend. Ryan can’t speak Spanish. Inside a polling place in the one-truck stop town nearest our house, Ryan votes for Trump. I vote for Hillary. We are the youngest people in the room, and he says we may as well have not come at all. At home he hovers over me, peels off a belt and jeans. A chore. Sometimes I think I like it. I imagine being snowed in with the same person for the rest of my life, fucking on the same floral couch in front of a space heater that’s made to look like four logs on fire.

STOP, DROP, AND ROLL WITH IT

By Jen LiMarzi

In the first grade we had guest speakers from the local fire department come in and lecture our class about what to do if we happened to catch fire. While I know crazy and horrific accidents can happen to anyone at any time, I wasn’t falling asleep to The Tonight Show with a lit cigarette in my mouth. I also wasn’t running a barbeque grill, lighting candles, or even allowed to operate the stove by myself. However, after a two hour presentation which included a film, coloring book, and hands on role playing where we took turns demonstrating how each of us could Stop, Drop, and Roll at the front of the class, I was fairly convinced that at any point I might spontaneously go up in flames.

MONKEY

By Brittany Meador

I once saw a monkey jerking it. It was at the zoo, of course, where several blue faced baboons swung over plaster tree trunks and romped across a funny little walkway modeled after a hanging bridge. As much as schools want zoo visits to be positive, educational experiences that transform the lives of young people forever, what has stuck with me in a lifetime's worth of field trips is deflated polar bears, hobbled cheetahs, and a monkey ignoring all the other monkeys to beat his meat. I think a lot about the animals in the zoo actually. Are they unhappy? I imagine it’s depressing to have your marrow-deep instincts defined by other, more intelligent creatures

A MIDNIGHT RANT ABOUT PUNCHES AND THE SIXTH SENSE

By Linnea Cooley 

A Rant about Being Bisexual: I have hated myself for being bisexual as long as I have known how to hate myself. I learned to hate myself right at the beginning. No. I learned to hate myself long before I learned I am bisexual. "Learned" is a funny way to describe it. It wasn't like I was reading a book and saw the word bisexual and stood up and closed the book and went on my way. No, it wasn't like that.

FOREVER METAL

By Michelle Nicolaysen

It started as my own private joke. On Friday nights, as a fourteen-year-old metal head, I’d watch Hells Bells: The Dangers of Rock and Roll, a Christian production meant to dissuade kids like me from listening to any popular music, so I could hear my favorite songs on the Sabbath. As Seventh-day Adventists, we didn’t engage in secular entertainment between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

By  Mary McIntyre

Cashier at Sbarro’s: When you told me I had pretty eyes, for once I believed a compliment about myself. After I grinned back at you, why did you have to ruin things by saying “But I’m not gay or anything?” All I wanted was a slice of pizza, but you gave me a side of fear of being proud about my sexuality in public. One and a half stars out of five.

HAVE YOU EVER CARRIED A DEAD BODY?

By Mathew Serback

Heavy. Stiff. Looks a lot like my father. As my mother panics, crying down the oversized muumuu that she wears, which fills me with such an intense sense of shame that I cannot focus on the dead body or why I’m supposed to carry it anywhere. Like a parachute, the muumuu floats down her rounded body. In the dim light also makes her look passable as a character from a Tim Burton movie.

BUTTER, EGGS, JELLY

By China Rain

I got a letter today, addressed to my dead mother, regarding my dead cat. Is Moxy up to date on his shots? Make an appointment online!. It’s funny getting someone's mail after they die. It’s similar to my using her frequent shopper card, or how I was using her Netflix account until the subscription ran out. They have no idea. I’m sure her email is full of coupons, “special offers!”, “get it now doorbuster sales!”, and “for a limited-time-onlys!”. Marketing to a dead woman. They just keep sending you shit till you die, and after.

PONY ISLAND

By Hannah Silverman

There’s this island full of ponies. You’ve probably heard of it. But it’s not what you imagine. It’s weird. Like, deserted and dirty and all of the ponies seem emaciated and sad and you’re allowed to touch them but why would you want to. The island has a long name that I can’t remember. I went there when I was maybe fourteen years old. I remember the age because I had this hat. It was green and huge on my head and truly ugly. But I loved it. And I wore it when I went to see the ponies on the weird/gross island with the name I can’t remember. I brought a guitar that was too small. Made for the child I no longer was.

NO SOLICITING

By Lindsey Wente

Zenith Avenue South: It is starting to smell like raw ground outside on my first day canvassing for PBS. On this April day that melts the snow but not fast enough, my trainer, Wes, teaches me the F.A.B. Structure as we roam a Minneapolis neighborhood. I’ve learned so far that the F.A.B Structure is how we respond when people say no at the door. “The F stands for friend,” he says. “Usually you say something like ‘Hey, I hear ya!’ acknowledging their apprehensions.” Wes likes to repeat phrases over and over because he’s used to speaking from a script. He has a nervous energy and says, “very cool,” in response to most things I say.

PIKE IN ALL PARTS

By Michael Washburn

Looking Back at Ted Hughes’s Chilling Poem “Pike”: Some of us remember the mind-blowing scene in Alien where the dismembered robot Ash (Ian Holm) describes the deadly creature as “a perfect organism.” This comes after the revelation of a secret directive that the alien must be brought back to Earth for examination and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable. The ship’s name is a reference to Joseph Conrad. Could another aspect of the film—Ash's bizarre admiration for the alien's perfection—have a literary antecedent? When revisiting Ted Hughes’s poem “Pike,” which appeared in the collection Lupercal in 1960 and which some have called one of the greatest poems written a

KISSATHON

By Robert Fromberg

1974. I stand in the main gathering area of the shopping mall. I was told that this is the largest shopping mall in the country. It is after midnight. On the floor around me are couples on mats, some covered in blankets. Maybe fifty couples, maybe more. All of the couples have their lips together. In theory, they are kissing. But at this point, after many hours, it is more accurate to say that they are holding their lips together.

WATCHING THE GRADUATE WITH MRS. ROBINSON

By Claudia Caplan

Let me say up front that it isn’t easy having an intimate conversation with someone who doesn’t have a first name. What do you call her?  Do you call her dear or darling or perhaps ma’am as though she’s the Queen of England?  How do you establish a rapport with someone who will forever be an honorific, even in the most intimate moments?  She and her husband are Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.

THREE FLASH MEMOIRS ABOUT THE ACT OF OBSERVATION

By Julie Benesh

Lookers: “Your ma has eyes in the back of her head.”  She’d laugh and laugh as I looked and looked. Before he was my father he ate carrots to pass the eye test to go to war. He met my mother-to-be on a double date with her foul-mouthed cousin with whom she lived. Later he’d wait for her to get home from dates with other boys, sitting on her porch and chatting with her aunt and uncle.

BOY TALK

By John Foley

Up West 115th street near a laundromat, a gay psychic tells me that I will spend my life as a dilettante. He says I need to "embrace" this fact, in order that I might survive. I know instantly that 1) it is true and 2) it will be a reality I violently fight, even as it continues to be true.

THE BLACK BINGER: AN ORIGIN STORY

By Jamilla D. VanDyke-Bailey

Elementary school was five long years filled with embarrassing moment after embarrassing moment. It was rough from the start. I began every morning of first grade crying. I was told that I would fall asleep on the bus from Boston; snoring, drooling and taking up space and sound.

MY (ALMOST) LIFE AS A SCREAM QUEEN

By Diane Englert

My acting agent called one spring day during my senior year of college, at the end of the glorious 1980s when I was about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in theatre. I landed an audition for a horror movie.

HELD, STEADY

By Mackenzie Moore

I’d like to be buried in the bass line of The Weekenders. That’s not a morbid request — it just feels like home. It feels like someone taking me by the hand and leading me into the Bowery Ballroom,

RENAISSANCE MAN

By Charles Lewis Radke

A few nights ago, I was in bed reading a James Salter novel when Karen FaceTimed me all the way from the other side of the house. “We hike tomorrow,” she said

THE ABYSS IN THE MIDDLE OF MY LIVING ROOM

By Jasmine Ledesma

I don’t have hobbies. Well, none that would please anybody else. I have ditched games of soccer, baking and drawing for reality television. My eyes gleam for hours. My schedule is rigorous.