Fiction
Stories that surprise, move, and stay with you. Our fiction explores lives both familiar and unfamiliar, offering a space for discovery and connection.
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I knew my dad had moved back to Oregon, but neither of us reached out right away. Winter came and went, I was busy with school, I felt bad about it. He called me in March, picking up as if it hadn’t been four years since we’d spoken. He needed help clearing out a defaulted
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Putting on a pot to boil, I could see my breath float away from me. So desperately, I wanted my air to keep dragging out like one long rope. It never did. No matter how hard I tried, the cloud always dissipated. I don’t know why it stopped, but it breaks my heart that it
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Rory Leary waited while his older sister, Maureen, stayed after school to finish a fourth-grade project. A boy with time to kill, he deemed it sufficient reason to dawdle in the plain joy of bouncing a small red hard-rubber ball against the floor and walls of the alcove outside her classroom. Nothing urged him home
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(Pops stood at the edge of the porch, listening hard. His hands rested on the railing, his ear cocked toward the stars; at the far end of the fields, the woods were wailing. All the trees cracked and groaned, all the chickens quivered and warbled in their coop, and Pops stood very still, listening. When
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On her bicycle, going west, she always stops at the lights by the Surrey Quays station. Partly this is because the odd tangle of road is a catnip for an accident; much safer to let each stream of traffic unfurl until she has a little green signal to beckon her on. And partly, too, because
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The man walking up the gravel drive looks to be in his fifties, sixties when nearer. Anton slides the bucket of cherries from the ladder’s top step. “You must be Tom,” he says, displaying a stained palm to turn away the one Tom offers. “Let’s go up to the house.” It’s strange having Tom here.
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She loses her virginity to a butch who is leaving in six days. Before that happens, there’s a queue for the printer. At least the WiFi is better. This butch with an undercut and Ray-Bans towers over her. Butch. It jammed last time I was here, she feels herself say. There’s a lilt in her
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Rachel and I sneak into the walk-in meat freezer even though we’ve got an hour left of our shift. We light cigarettes and shiver and duck when the maître d’ walks past looking for us. She tells me she loves me and she’s going to miss me, and I tell her I’d rather die in
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Moira had been alone on the platform for several minutes before he arrived. He glided past her without a glance and walked right up to the edge, pushing onto tiptoes and craning forward to check the tunnel for trains. Moira felt a stab of fear that the man’s bulky hikers’ backpack would topple him to
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It’s twenty-eight years I’ve lived here on Aphra Street. Twenty-eight, coming up twenty-nine. I moved here on November 22, 1963, a Friday. Maybe I wouldn’t have remembered the date so precisely had it not been the day that Oswald shot Kennedy, that was all people seemed to be talking about that day, and for days