NOBODY’S DAUGHTER by Ryan-Ashley Anderson

I was almost five years old, it was Christmas day, and I knew something was wrong because I’d gotten everything I’d asked for: a blue and white-checked gingham romper with buttons up the front; black, mid-calf cowboy boots with red stitching; and, most surprisingly, a fluffy black puppy with a bright white chest whom I would come to call Kentucky. I had never been to Kentucky and am not even sure how I’d learned the name, but I’d tested out several words from my dog name list and determined this was the best one.  A dog’s name should ring out…

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RUN by Karen Kao

Back then, the law center sat in a squat square flanked on one side by a free needle exchange and on the other by a flophouse that rented its rooms by the hour. I was late to class. I think it was Civil Procedure. One hundred pairs of eyes calculated my chances of failing as I took the only seat available in the first row next to her. She had red hair and green eyes and the kind of adorable tipped-up nose that I have always wanted to have. She came from a working class Irish Catholic family with priests…

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ON THE NOSTALGIA OF DRIED APRICOTS AND OTHER GARBAGE by Jeanann Verlee

I am 41. Standing at the Formica counter of a roach-friendly Queens apartment five lifetimes ago, I crumble gorgonzola over flatbread dough, then stud it with gems of diced dried apricot and fresh thyme—ready for the oven. The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures. Today I failed to provide the right sports drink, so I’m fucking stupid and goddamn selfish. Wordless, I return to the grocery, buy two six-packs of whatever he prefers. Something pink,…

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I ALWAYS SAY I LOVE YOU FIRST by Bob Hill

I want to tell you about a day in late August of 2009. It is just past noon, and this is a clear day, a gorgeous day with almost zero headwind. I am sitting on the street-level deck of an Upper East Side coffee shop named M. Rohrs’. M. Rohrs’ is located just off of 86th and 2nd. The traffic is moving briskly throughout this part of town, and that is because the city has settled into a malaise, an annual two-week period that bridges the divide between true summer and the academic fall. This is a quiet time in…

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SMIONAGAR by Catherine O’Brien

CW deep grief Smionagar (Irish word meaning shattered fragments or pieces).    It is an orchard bathing in fog but you would have described it as a swatch of your life receiving its daily powdered kiss. It is a ramshackle house, your former home, but you would have said it’s where you learned that some parasols don’t always give shade to their own suns. It is the anger that you are gone and that the sunrise doesn’t have the decorum to abandon its rays. It is having no jurisdiction over when and where your unpunctual and formidable smile will thaw…

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SOME BRIGHT FUTURE by Jason Hardung

Ten years, Dad broke his back for the railroad for ten years and they laid him off, leaving him unemployed with a new mortgage and us two boys to raise on his own. My little brother Jeremy and I became the poorest kids of our middle-class neighborhood. The unnurtured ones, the unsupervised ones, the ones who strayed the streets in the middle of the night. Feral beasts snapping at the moon. The ones sent into the store with a book of food stamps while our father waited in the car. And when we objected, because we had pride too, our…

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DEALBREAKERS by Rachel Dorn

Would you date a dying girl I type in the message box. My thumb hovers over the send button. I hit delete. What are ur dealbreakers I type instead. **************** We don’t say terminal anymore, Janessa, my support group leader, says on one of our monthly Zoom calls. We say incurable. Because, you know, people can live a long time with this now. What doesn’t need to be said is that not all of us will. **************** In the months after I find out I have an incurable heart and lung disease, I spend a lot of time thinking about…

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WHAT THE BODY WOULD NOT HOLD by Liana Meffert

(Spring) We have to count several times to get the numbers right. There are so many. Superior right buttock, inferior left buttock, and flank, right temple, right chest, left lower leg, and thigh. And when the counts agree, we sit down to call his mother, who doesn’t answer, but calls back several minutes later. Whether she believes us or not is beside the point; she hangs up. I hate this. Wouldn’t you? We call the medical examiner and the organ donation center, who will in turn call her, and then she will begin to believe, or won’t. There isn’t a…

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OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES by Brittany Thomas

We drove to Dorset to be alone, not to hunt fossils.   We drove south to sit in silence, to read books by bayed windows, to feed a tiny wood stove pieces of the year. We let ourselves be washed by the shoreline, our sore city spirits cleansed like frail Victorians suffering hysteria. What more can anyone ask of an English October?  Here the Fossil Wardens beg your help: please take what you find. You see, our fossils make their way out of 66 million years of mud and clay to the Jurassic Coast only to fall on the beach and…

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