creative prose

It was not without unpleasantness that I answered the first phone call from a tabloid. They wanted to know what I remembered about the incident. I said, “Things are still a little hazy.” I roughly remembered being at an airport with Noga, watching her curls furl and...

My mother was sick, “sick unto death,” as Poe wrote. With my beleaguered father unable to work as an accountant and look after me and my six siblings, my mother asked her older sister Roxanne, a more patient and practical soul, to raise me until further notice. We...

Nina Salas was six years old when she was branded unpatriotic by school officials. The frazzled principal Mr. Kirk, her matronly first-grade teacher Mrs. Clayton, and the grouchy secretary at the front desk all agreed: Nina was unpatriotic.Every morning, Nina’s...

The buzz of the world enters her dream before she knows she’s waking up. A low flying police helicopter. The irregular cadence of a leaf-blower. Heavy tires too fast on the neighboring street. The Doppler shift of a passing siren.Up through her body the dream fades,...

Clark heard the car six seconds before it popped into view. The noise was dull. Just a low thud like a garbage truck. But that was the way it was: duller on the inside, and always felt more than heard.The hood crumpled first. Then went the windows in a kaleidoscopic...

Welcome to the Wild and Bewildering you are about to Embark on. This is a Path not for the faint of Heart or weak of Mind. It is riddled with the Proverbial Bodies of our Talentless Ancestors, those whom may have Tried and Failed miserably. Don’t listen to Anyone who...

This is the story of a woman who wants to sleep but cannot because her mind won’t stop wandering, a woman who knew that publishing her first work would be difficult, but who wasn’t expecting three sleepless nights in a row, who puts herself in bed and closes her eyes...

12.08.16He’s in a small town where she once lived, thinking of their old friend. He’s in the grips of something horrible, as if nauseated by how quickly he uprooted himself. He ran away because he was afraid, a coward in the way he suddenly packed his bags in the...

IIt was the first day of 1975, and the woman had little comfort left in her heart. She had sworn off all hope of ever bearing a child; the last loss came and went without warning, without fight, without defense. She wandered around the house in her mother’s old...

There were plenty of kids we made fun of in high school — the girl with the face tattoo; the foreign exchange student from Wales; Male Leslie — but Anna was different. Nothing ever fazed her. In fact, it seemed like she enjoyed when people pulled on her braids as they...

The front yard of the house we bought in Lebanon, Illinois, needed a lot of work. The driveway wasn’t quite level. Every weekend for a month, Ed dug into the earth, replacing freshly turned over soil with gravel. He planted a maple sapling in the front yard, too. At...

content warning: childhood sexual abuseSpace is a concept that most can never understand; Autumn and I, we know it well.We tussled with it floating upon the endless sea, taken by darkness that stripped all hope. We converged with it arriving upon these shores, the...