creative prose

Jacob Papadopoulos runs ahead of me, past the turnstile and the shag teddy bear mascot, launching his petite 50-year-old body gracefully into the hard plastic seat of the ride. He resembles a trapeze artist more than a distinguished classics professor at Manatee...

On my knees in front of him, I try to picture him as an altar. I don’t pray, and I also don’t particularly believe in god, so the image shifts—more than I would like it to. Eventually, everything settles into one thought, one feeling, one penetrating pinprick...

Sunaina stood in the back room of the house. Painted canvases and framed paintings leaned against each other along the lengths of two walls. A heap of rolled-up watercolor paintings stood in a corner. By her side, the afternoon light flooded in through sliding glass...

​“I’ll go and tend to the roses!” Gerald hitched up the rusty wheelbarrow and pushed it along the wooden path. He was headed for the bushes opposite the huge pit that evoked the shape of a pond. Swerving from side to side, he was careful not to step too heavy on any...

Bo didn’t know how long he’d been sitting on the cold tiled bathroom floor. Maybe five or ten or thirty minutes. He'd listened to the recordings over and over. His grandmother had been right, and he knew better now why they needed to keep their gift a secret. He...

All the men in my life have problems that seem easy to fix, but none of them ever seem to fix them. I find it hard to empathize —at times. “I wish we only had to see each other once a week,” Paul says. He’s complaining about his girlfriend. “Three times a week is...

I don’t dance, but I did with him that night. The air hung heavy and hot around our heads, and little gnats glanced off our skin like pinpricks. Unwelcome, but no real blood drawn. Chatter and clinks from other people’s night floated out into the fading evening. The...

  “Are we allowed to be here?” I asked as I looked down into the hole that would be a grave in a few short minutes. He stepped in to stand beside me. “If not, they’ll make us leave,” he said. We looked around and there was no one to make us leave, for the moment....

A pigeon sits atop a tree and gasps for breath back. Novelist Richard Price once gave the advice that “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You...

Upon the Aurès Mountains  a d VIII Id Jan, VII a r c1 (8 January 256 CE)  NumidiaModified after Karten von Römischen Provinzen (detail) from Römische Provinzen by Theodor Mommsen, 1921 via commons.wikimedia.org. © Bin im Garten. CC BY-SA 3.0In 256 CE, a mystic warrior...

Photograph by Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro The few tenants left on Piazza di Santa Maria awoke to find a fallen palm tree lying in the middle of the square. The wind had caught it. A second palm remained five meters tall on the opposite side, alone and defiant. The early...

I was the last child of four — and the hardest to deliver. I feel a little bad about this fact, but I was getting even for being the runt of the litter. Whichever part of me would turn difficult years later decided it’s best to get even before I could be scolded. It’s...