I am fourteen. I am depressed. My doctor puts me on Zoloft, which decreases sex drives in adults, and prevents me from developing a sex drive in the first place. My fatal flaw is that I do not know this. Instead, I believe I am holy.
A Visitor Comes to Rondo | Debra Stone
In the backyard of 841 Rondo Avenue, the barbecue cloud floated above them, wrapped around the house like Grandma Essie’s arms. As usual, Grandpa Joe’s stubby brown cigar, clamped tight between his lips, rested in the corner of his mouth. In one hand, a sweating bottle of Grain Belt Beer. In […]
Missoula Stop-gap | Chris Potter
Two blue hiking poles stood upright in the snow. Two stories up, dark hair spilled over the balcony. The apartment complex looked deserted, yet there he was. “You came back!” Cash called down to me. “I had no choice. They closed the campgrounds.” “Want to unload the truck?” “No. I […]
Still Life with Bottle | Anne Colwell
For you, James. In graduate school, we’d drink the Spanish Rioja, then you’d put a red candle in the empty bottle as we drank the next. Hunched over the kitchen table in the basement apartment, we watched the red wax slide down the green curves, pool on the cloth and […]
Pangani | Michael Don
Tomorrow will be one week since the mall attack. Our roommates are out dancing. They’re younger than us, unmarried, work nine to five, and have been in Nairobi over a year. They live in large rooms featuring wood floors and built-in dressers. They lost a friend in the attack. Another […]
Love, Like in the Movies | Darius Stewart
I’ve been thinking about my first adolescent crush, who he might’ve been among the rough-neck, drug-dealing fuckboys posted on street corners like traffic signs in the Lonsdale projects where I grew up, an older blackboy dropped out of high school who kept a low profile with his crew in the […]
Omissions | Lauren McGovern
June 22, 2020 Dear Lauren: We’re updating the school’s website and need a new faculty bio from you by August 19, since you’re moving into a new teaching position this September. Thank you for your attention in this matter. Sincerely, *** The Communications Team June 25, 2020 Dear Team: Here’s […]
Nights to Nowhere, 1987 | Wendy BooydeGraaff
The night I discovered raspberry schnapps, you and I shared the whole mickey1 on someone’s parents’ bed. Maybe that was the night that solidified our high school friendship, made me have picnics in the park with you when I came back summers from college, made us contact each other on […]
Charles | Juli C. Lasselle
My name is not my given name; it’s my chosen name. The women in my family—my mother, my sister, and I—all have names we chose for ourselves and all have different surnames. It can be confusing, this history of re-identification. It’s common enough for people to rename themselves, to reclaim […]
Midnight Album | Jeff Fleischer
“Want to take a ride?” my mother asks. It’s past eleven, and I’m watching David Letterman on the small TV in my bedroom, the one without a remote. I only finished my homework a few minutes ago, during one of the commercial breaks after tonight’s top-ten list. We don’t have […]
Fearful Symmetries | Jeff McLaughlin
My father rarely raised his voice. Growing up the eldest of nine in a house with only four bedrooms left him reserved, thoughtful, and inclined towards subtlety. He used a modest inheritance, the only financial help he ever received from his family, to purchase a sailboat, in part because it […]
Guns & Mariah Carey | T. Abeyta
While I always had my head in a book, my Dad was busy cleaning his guns. I’m still not sure what there is to clean in a gun, but there was never a cleaner gun than his. He took them apart on a little wooden TV tray table while he […]
Encountering Iron | Jeri Griffith
The port city of Bilbao is good place to encounter iron. With a history steeped in steel, ship-building and the shipping industry, the tradition for iron works and iron workers runs deep. That heritage is celebrated by artist Richard Serra at Guggenheim Bilbao in his monumental work titled The Matter […]
Canada | Erika Veurink
1. Drawn on the back of an uncorrected proof of Aaron Kunin’s Love Three is a grid-like arrangement of thirty-six circles. Thirty-five of them are penciled in like test answers. The rows of spheres slant left. They are the hours I have waited to see him. I turn the book […]
Anxious Fish | Ysabelle Cheung
In the market near your flat, the fish are still partially alive when you buy them. The yellow-aproned woman calls you over, gesturing to the croaker, the red snapper—“so fresh! I’ll give it to you for 35 dollars!”—with blood on their gelatinous eyes, their snouts, leaking or twitching all over […]
An Interview | Shaqayeq Ahmadian on The Continuum of Life
I first became familiar with Shaqayeq Ahmadian’s work after I found her page on Instagram one night in 2018. Since then, I have followed her development as an artist and we have become friends, bonding over the experience of being young women working in creative fields; however, because she lives […]
An Interview | Emily Neuberger on the Golden Age of Musical Theater
Growing up between Lake Forest, Illinois, and Long Island, New York, debut novelist Emily Neuberger dreamt of the Broadway stage. She began voice lessons early, at age twelve, and, throughout her adolescence, starred in numerous community and regional productions. She went on to study musical theater at NYU, along with […]
An Interview | Patty Gone on Understanding Gender Poles Through Danielle Steel
Patty Gone makes art about popular things. They have a strong curiosity for what makes people obsessed with Kim Kardashian or why people want to dress in all Gucci. Their work often focuses on different poles in culture and gender in the attempt to draw people toward some kind of […]
An Interview | Pema Tseden on Folktales, Films, and Creativity
Award-winning Tibetan writer and filmmaker, Pema Tseden, makes a stop in NYC along his US tour to discuss his English-language debut, Enticement: Stories of Tibet.
An Interview | Karan Mahajan on Cricket, Distance, and Histories of the Present
Karan Mahajan is the author of two novels, Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs. His second novel drew me into his work through its unusual structure, in which the story radiated from the center and expanded outwards just like a bomb. When I read a novel and think […]