Fiction Pick of the Week: "Nobody Girl"
A flight attendant caught between various loves and worlds.
Little Fiction
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Ruins, 2005"
A student navigates unexpected connections and the threat of terrorism.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Fire Season"
Two friends contend with mistakes both past and present.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Exact Same Prize" (reprint)
A Longform Fiction reprint: The complexities of a grandmother's wish to die.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Railroad Blues"
Small town loneliness, memories, and mistakes.
Fiction: "Holograms"
Three teenagers, their futures, the concept of alternate realities.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Beneath the Atlas"
A story of maps, travels, and (un)couplings.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "E Ticket"
An examination of teenage lust and hierarchies on a trip to Disneyland.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Simcoe Furriers"
A taxidermist's life gradually spins out of control.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "I Only Want to Talk About the Nice Things"
On the eve of their daughter's wedding, a divorced couple is confused by old feelings despite sexual identities.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Girls Like That Eat Lemon Poundcake"
Southern generational and gender divides.
"I got the word. When I saw her turning up the earth for peonies, it was like those clumps of hard red clay were speaking to me. Those spindly arms of hers with tattoos down to her elbows begged for someone with a hearty dose of Luke, Matthew, and Paul."
American Fare
A prison cook reflects on her daughter as she prepares a prisoner's last meal.
"See what I mean? Fussiness knows no bounds. Not even for inmates. We don’t serve shit-on-a-shingle, but sometimes you’d never believe it. Last week Brenda and me whipped up fifteen pans of German chocolate cake and don’t you know some idiot come up to Brenda complaining about the “presentation,” said his mama always made German chocolate cake in two layers, not in a sheet pan. Everybody’s a critic."
Inheritance
A story of time passage and land inheritance.
"While we watched the flame chew the wood, I thought of the years of sun and rain that had turned a tiny sapling into a towering spruce: Grandpa had introduced himself to Grandma at a church function. They married a few years later. They purchased River Farm from a family who’d owned it for three generations and were moving somewhere north near Baptiste or Athabasca. There, they raised a family of eleven, and harvested a barley crop fifty-five times in fifty-five years. And then Grandma, once Grandpa had passed, moved into the city when the farm became too much."
