Rushing through the mall on your lunch hour, you spot Joanie in the food court. How long’s it been? Two years? Three? She looks the same. Well, maybe a little sloppier. She’s got on sweats and a baseball hat, her hair gathered into a messy […]
The Bridge by Lucy Zhang
The area beyond the bridge is said to be haunted: where the fallen red leaves halt at the bank and a short, flat rectangular piece of concrete extends over a rivulet–barely even an arm’s length above water. Teal balustrades cage the bridge in, the posts […]
Shade Tree Haven by Mitchell Toews
On hot Sundays, I often think of the Tourist Park in Ste. Anne. Their new concrete pool was a cube punched into the grass and filled to the white-tiled rim, the water mirror bright. With our family bakery twenty miles distant—dark, quiet, and still—Dad would […]
Farmland Reverie and Newsprint by Mary Ellen Gambutti
Farmland Reverie In reverie, I escape the moral uncertainty of these times into a place where sweet air satisfies and the spirit of nature presides. Such a place of calm is a remnant of rusticity that called me in my youth to restore a […]
Invented Love by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri
I’ve tried to invent the perfect mother. I should be packing boxes, but it’s exhausting stripping a room of history. Connection. One mother is foul-mouthed, rife with gruff glamour. Smoking cigarettes, with one of those voices like Marlene Dietrich. She’s the kind who doesn’t pronounce […]
Devil Painting by Robert Boucheron
On a wall over the dining table hung a large painting, oil on canvas in a gilded frame. The painting showed a young woman in a long white gown and blond braids. She stood on a stage with her mouth open. Behind her stood a […]
Where by Erica Dawn
“Where were you last night?” We’ve already had this conversation twice this morning. She’s forgotten it again. So I explain one more time. Slowly because she has to read my lips and now her eyes are going, too. “Mom, I was here last night.” It […]
Tree Stump for Babies by Joanna Friedman
Motherhood didn’t start on a dark and steamy night. Or by accident. Or in the back seat of a car. It started the first month after her husband said yes to a baby. The day the test read positive, she swore she’d only tell him, […]
Curb Sofa by RJC Smith
I came home from work and sat in the sofa we had dragged off the curb a few weeks earlier. I say ‘in’, rather than ‘on’, because I would sink into it. It was way too big for one person, but not big enough for […]
2020 Pushcart Prize Nominees
It gives me great pleasure to share the following six stories, which I’ve just yesterday sent to the Pushcart Press for consideration in next year’s Pushcart Prize selections. Whether you’ve given these pieces a read already or are reading them now for the first time, […]
Photoreal by Vasilios Moschouris
That morning on the porch, I held my breath—the familiar pressure inside my chest greeting me—then exhaled; the burning tang of nicotine blended with the minted pines across the water, its hanging cloud dissipating as a cool breeze washed over the lake. The smoke singed […]
Faint, Faint by C.C. Russell
I was never romantic enough to offer you my umbrella. Of course, where we lived you couldn’t even buy umbrellas for the most part due to the wind. And that isn’t the kind of people that we were. But the point still stands. I wouldn’t […]
