By Brittany L. McCann (This story contains disordered eating.) The numbers on the digital scale blur through my watery eyes as the Birthday Song is belted out in a possible worst signing voice contest down the hall. I wipe the back of my arm across my eyes and stare down…
By Jason Weiland You can almost make out the color of my 1970 AMC Gremlin and the patina of the sun-baked paint combining into a shade that can only be described as puke-yellow. I’m stuck here and haven’t moved since dawn. Car’s pointed west, sure enough. A stretch of Route 66…
By Sam Grieve Honeymouth The first climb he suggests starts on the Pipe Track. She meets him near the lower cable station. This is before the cable car is redone, before the city reintroduces itself to the world. The old cable car is a rectangular, white box. A thousand feet…
By Phibby Venable An angel was perched delicately on the straight back chair in the corner, but everyone pretended not to see her. At least it appeared that way to fifteen – year old Katie, who couldn’t take her eyes off the golden wings and slim figure. “Mama, don’t you…
By Hannah Meade My fiancé, Brian, died exactly five years ago today. Five whole years have already passed and still, I feel the heart-wrenching sadness I felt on the day he died. I find myself snuggling back up in my grey sheets, wanting a few more minutes of peace before…
By Anikah Burge It started out like any typical day would for me. As Mama made lunch in the next room, I watched the world through the only window I was allowed to look through. I never grew tired of the view. We lived next to and across from many…
by Bradley J. Scott, III Across the road from Mee Maw’s house, gray mist rose above the cornfield. That cool mist covered my face on what normally became an unbearable July day. Now a city boy, it was something I hadn’t felt in quite some time. Nor had been sitting…
by Elizabeth Christopher Sylvie’s done with worry. She clicks off the ten o’clock news, thinking what a relief it is to be done with it, like a cool current rolling under the skin. Their kids are grown and gone. Their youngest didn’t turn out to be soft in the head….
by Peter Breyer Who loved me more, Sita or Govinda? The thought consumed me as I exited the Pan Am Clipper in Bombay. The air was so thick that it smelled. I walked into the terminal with large, swirling fans hanging from the dirty ceiling above. Counters were piled high…
by Kaitlyn Badger-Turner It was fall of 1944 in Auschwitz Birkenau when Joseph’s will to live was almost completely snuffed from him. He collapsed face first in the thick mud, barely registering people shuffling around his crumpled figure. A young woman with shaved hair and sunken cheeks eventually turned him…