Randall Cox I delivered newspapers in the nineties, setting out from my apartment in Mount Pleasant to a route in Jacksonboro. An eighty mile round trip, the route was an absolute disaster of a business plan. Worse than robbing Peter to pay Paul, it was more like robbing Peter and Paul to pay my own … Continue reading Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. by Jeff Tweedy →

Laura Valeri Lucy finished her round of depositions early. She could have gone home. Tonya would have surely appreciated help with dinner, but Lucy felt caught in an impulse that was growing alarmingly frequent. She drove, listening to the end of an Indigo Girls song, wanting nothing more than to keep driving, not towards home, … Continue reading Harlequin Babies →

Elizabeth DelConte Milly didn’t want to save Mazie Pinkerton. She wasn’t even sure she was capable of saving her. Still, she yanked her dress over her head and kicked off her shoes. Dove into Jones Pond and skimmed across the water the way she’d seen the muskrats do. Head watching above and below and to … Continue reading From Away →

Natalie Troy Snow falls as I walk to the neighborhood sentō, two blocks and a hundred yen for a hot bath. I remove my shoes, pay, and slip through the noren patterned with white cherry blossoms against red, a red so vivid it reminds me of the drop of blood that splashed into the bathroom sink … Continue reading What You Said →

Lori Horvitz Carrie hadn’t told me about her fear of germs, but she did tell me the last woman she dated walked out on her when she went on about the benefits of liquid soap over bar soap. She told me she liked a clean bathroom and kitchen. She told me she had a case … Continue reading On the Benefits of Liquid Soap →

A.J. Romriell I sat in the backseat of my parents’ car, travelling down the freeway at seventy. Far too quickly. I wanted to take my time, move slower. Stop. It was as if with every mile we moved, I could feel myself cracking. My sister grasped my hand, but I couldn’t look at her. She … Continue reading Gracious Ruin →

Anna Kaye-Rogers There are many different ways to be a girl, but I wonder if I am alone when I am surprised about all the blood. There is so much of it, unexpectedly, in the strangest of places. Each nervous meeting of index finger to thumb leaves little red pricks, the places we worriedly tear … Continue reading raw then red →

Gabriela Denise Frank Americans have something lonely about them. I don’t know what the reason might be, except maybe that they’re all descended from immigrants. ―Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup Growing up, I felt a sick attraction to people with money. My parents were the opposite: minimally educated, obtusely Midwestern, financially brittle—embarrassing to my … Continue reading Enough →

Charlie Watts Columbus arrives at the dump and unlocks the gate. Chicken hawks launch from the top of the chain-link fence, backlit by an unremarkable sunrise. Crusted car parts, baby diapers, and the husks of old televisions make a hulking spine that runs through the lot. Ragweed and mugwort, pushing into open spaces, tremble in … Continue reading Dump Columbus →