A body, lying in the alley across the street. I saw it, early in the morning, from the window of my third-floor apartment. The narrow space had been secured with yellow tape. Two men lifted it onto a gurney, then into the rear compartment of a van. I watched while kneeling on my sofa. The …
To read this Editor’s Note, please purchase a copy of Issue #22
“There’s a boy here for your mother’s dog.” Franny’s father is only supposed to call her at work if there’s something wrong—and a lot had gone wrong in the last year, as her mother had become more and more ill—but now her mother is gone, and Franny assumed her father had figured out how to …
It wasn’t supposed to snow in Alabama. In fact, when Sasha and her family left Iowa for Alabama when her daughter was still in diapers, that was her first thought: no more fucking snow. In Iowa, where she went to grad school for studio art, they rented a house on a corner lot, so they …
In the middle of the night, the woman does the opposite of what she is supposed to do. While her phone vibrates with the National Weather Service warning, she puts her dog, Samson, crate and all, into the safest room of the house, an interior bathroom with no windows. She shuts the door on his …
In Florida, in a house built on swampland, Anne searches for a leak. Warm floors bead fallen water, but there is no leak. It’s just the air. Conditioned air should be dry, but not here. Here the warmth and wetness flake paint from the walls. Pink and green chips gather in cracks. Windows fog in …
No. 1 It’s an old story—a stranger comes to town. Re-enacted annually in scattered departments across the campus—the stranger from a big midwestern university system and the stranger from McGill, the stranger with the grant, the stranger who came with a partner hired simultaneously in another department—two-for-one strangers. The department would reshuffle, the stranger a …
Chance went right past the puppies. Without even a cursory look, he dismissed the cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs. He’d been disappointed to learn the pet store didn’t sell his favorite animal, honey badgers. Allison and Jonathan watched their son linger at the cage of a vicious-looking thing, a weasel or ferret, before moving on …
Deesha Philyaw‘s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, …
Reflecting decades of an extraordinary writing career, Ed Park’s new short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, offers a reading experience akin to entering the enchanted curio cabinet of his mind. To examine its contents is an exercise that proves fascinating, slightly puzzling, and always rewarding. If there are mismatched candlesticks found inside said …