By Katharine Weber
In 1920, Eli and Morris left their little brother Julius in Budapest with some cousins. There is nothing in any Zip’s Candies record or family story with details about what provisions, if any, they made for him. Did they feel guilty about Julius, abandoned at the last moment with the Fischer family, barely-known [...]

By Kamila Shamsie

By Jincy Willett
The men had passed out after a grand dinner party. And the conversation among the women suddenly took a turn. Might it be the pistachios?

By Dawn Ryan
“Where we going?”  Beth asked. “We going to the blacktop?” That’s where they played, a tar-topped broken bottled parking lot outside their apartment building. Tall, climbable pines stood along the edge of the blacktop. Beth liked it there. She could hide in the trees.
Beth and Sara played barefoot, dodging glass shards and forming [...]

By John Jodzio
After Chloe’s last suicide attempt, the one with the grapefruit knife, her father, Greer Burton cleaned out the storage space above his garage.  He horsed an exam table destined for scrap off the University Hospital’s loading dock and bumped it up his back stairs with the hospital’s dolly.  He purchased a cut-rate x-ray [...]

By Leslie Jamison
The mountain was their mother. She chewed the sunlight and spit it out between her teeth like coca. Her mouths were made of dirt. Her tits were full of silver. She had killed a thousand men, maybe more. The sun looked at her like a man looks at a woman, fierce and hungry. [...]

By Kevin Grauke
He peeked over his magazine at the other two men in the waiting room of the Gladstone Clinic, wondering if, like him, they’d come to see how well their “boys could swim,” as Dr. Victorino had put it the day before in what Parrish guessed had been an attempt at levity and camaraderie.  [...]

By Ashley Warlick

My son, who lives deep in the wilderness of three years old, checks my heartbeat with a plastic stethoscope. He says, Almost done, Mama, one more. I breathe for him. He says, You’re here, which is what he says when I come home from work. When he talks on the telephone, he says [...]

By Anthony Swofford
She was proud to be Idi Amin’s mistress, to love the most powerful and feared man in Africa. But she also wanted to bear his children, and no deal with the despot ended with one’s humanity intact.

By Keith Lee Morris
All of a sudden, college started coming a little too easy.