
OLD ENOUGH by Isabelle Hughes
There hadn’t been this much excitement since the boys came home from war with their uniforms and their little triangular hats. They’d been shipped off again.

There hadn’t been this much excitement since the boys came home from war with their uniforms and their little triangular hats. They’d been shipped off again.

I pull up hard and dredge out a congealed braid of hair the length of an arm. Horrified, I keep pulling and it just keeps coming.


My mother is bursting at the seams and I am watching her stitching begin to give.

For now he made his home in men. Or rather, for a time, they lodged in him while he saved up seed money.

Have fun. Be yourself. All that live free Target store bullshit. But it’s true.

For one heartbeat, I wanted it to be true. I wanted to see my own father facedown on the tile, spattered in his own blood.


Clostromonia was beautiful. She was big-breasted and a fine cook. Epsilon’s fellow noblemen regularly begged for slices of her bimbleberry pie. “Ay, Epsilon,” they’d say, “I’m going to snatch the pie from your maiden’s windowsill along with the big-breasted beauty who made it!” In these moments, Epsilon felt proud.

Growing up surrounded by people constantly quoting the latest gross-out comedy or something like Star Wars it makes me feel a little dirty whenever I say a line from a movie.