Rowan Bartolomei

Jacob Schlote

"He says he ordered a kid’s meal to be just like you, but you aren’t old enough to understand. It still doesn’t completely sink in because you know there’s not a need to understand, only wanting to bask in the gloriousness of reliving the event."

Michael McGuire

But for the moment I was adrift. Whatever usual anchor holding me in place, keeping me tethered to whatever temporal geography I occupied had been pulled up and I’d been cast unto uncharted seas.

Ziaul Moid Khan

"In a week, the whole village became acquainted with Ummed Ali. Kauser never felt him a burden. When the neighbors enquired of him, she simply said, 'It is perhaps God’s will that he should get his food and shelter here at our place.'"

Aaron Barry

"like twinkies, rhinestones can survive nuclear war. / (that’s probably not true, but a guy wearing a bedazzled ed hardy koi shirt / once told me that outside a casino, and there’s no way he would have been lying.)"

Jennifer Brown

"I felt like a bird warming up in the dark. I was so young. Thought every moment was a fractal of forever."

Megan Waring

"say no again and again to going / into work, to polite smalltalk dinners, to any invitation / that isn’t two cans of spray paint and a dusky overpass"

Zary Fekete

"My wife is fearless and, even though her Hungarian isn’t perfect, she will talk with anyone. I think it was this willingness which won her over to our neighbor who had initially seemed standoffish and confused as to why this American couple and their cat were in Hungary."

Elsa Valmidiano

"I wasn’t exactly sure how abortions happened, except it was a word tossed around school grounds as easy as saying, 'Math.' It was an easy word. A common word."

Nancy J. Fagan

"Her mother and grandmother raised their faces to the sun, and I wondered if they sensed peril as I did. Though I angled my chaise away from the three of them, they stayed in my periphery. That’s something Vivi would have done; she looked out for strangers."