by Jacqueline Coleman “The Hope Index” placed second in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2025 Fall Fiction Contest. My manager says hospitals smell like hope— it’s better branding than what they actually smell like, which is dying children and hand sanitizer. They brief me in the van: our segment underperformed in…
by Jess Prosser “Home Base” placed third in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2025 Fall Fiction Contest. You live in a small two-bedroom house, that is more like a big shack with walls that make you feel like you’re in a storage space. You live on a military base in California…
by Andrea Lisowski “Stone Teeth” placed fourth in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2025 Fall Fiction Contest. Half a mile behind the Cathedral of St. Casimir, there’s a sad excuse for a waterfall. It’s three feet high and twenty feet long of stratified shale, iron gray, stream bed pitted like a…
by Ryan Fagan “The Replacement Shift” placed fifth in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2025 Fall Fiction Contest. I clock in at 6:02 p.m., and the scanner greets me like a metronome. Beep. Beep. Beep. The lights hum too bright for dusk, carts yawn, doors breathe us in and out. The…
by Charly Murmann Did I fall for you? I think I may have loved you. Maybe I did. Or maybe I loved the idea of falling in love with you. I fell in love with you. I loved your name: not common, chosen, and mysterious—Attic. I never asked you how…
by Rowan Tate I Suspect That Moths and Regret share a language no one translates. Grief has poor timing and excellent posture; I am learning to walk without finishing the sentence. I am not who I meant to become, but the bread still rises.
by Lucy Carr I dreamt of the red and yellow wool blanket that my wife, Evelyne, brought back from Morocco. She had purchased it in Tangier just before crossing the Straits of Gibraltar by ferry. I reached down to my calves to pull it across my body, my arms trembling…
by Jim Tilley We are used to white birches in the forest growing straight and tall, but I passed by one in a yard, bent and twisted, branches curled downward to the ground before rising again, as if it had suffered too many ice storms and never recovered. Beside it, a lush sugar maple grown taller, dominating the…
by John Neal “You have such a lovely house,” Meg said. “Is it?” Kate said. The words were out of her mouth before she realized she should have simply said “thank you.” Now Meg was giving her a funny look, and then maybe she figured Kate was being modest because…
by Sam Hendrian A Saturday afternoon comprised Of coupon compromises Among stockroom on-the-clockers Who wish people knew how to read hours of operation. Lingerie shops compete To see who can best fetishize denim And which A-list actress turned B-list model Can master that “I don’t care” stare. Public displays of affection By eighth-grade graduates Who will still laugh…