Volume - 2026

It’s hopeless if the cubes settle on the bottom of the glass. A straw can pierce a cherry only if there’s enough Coke left for the ice to float and the angle is exactly right...

My name is Mark Raskin, or it was when I was alive. Or it still is. I'm not sure how that works. My dad died before I was born...

Sixty-two and an only child, I sit alone in my car...

The wind blows hard enough to rattle your bones, lifting dust from dried mud and lodging it in your throat until you cough up something thick and metallic...

Many years ago, a young girl was lying in the middle of the storm. Her parents' shouts and yells caused the trees to bend and their stomps, the house to shake...

I sat tensely in the witness box, my vision and hearing narrowed to a rectangle that ran from me to the judge. The rest of the courtroom, including my husband...

We are in a psychiatrist’s office lined with books. A man, BRADNEY, is lying on the proverbial coach whilst speaking with his DOCTOR...

No one felt at ease when the man entered the house. Ludmila would poke at the fireplace logs, which the late Mr. Frederico used to light on stormy days...

After the three-hour drive from our third-floor walkup in Brooklyn, we turn onto a short, unpaved track and I get my first glimpse of the shimmering lake...

His father said he was only going in for one. He said it through the half-open driver’s window with the easy certainty of a man saying something he expected to be believed because he had said it often enough before...

Dear 18-year-old me,
I’ve been thinking about you lately.
Your daughter—yes, we have two little mini-mes—asked me the other day...

There are weeks in a life that you recognize, even as they happen, as something you will carry forever. We have had our share. But if Beth and I had to name one—one week above all others...

Falling into a black hole, a dying star gets pulled apart. On a faraway planet the wise men wonder: Do astral pathways just happen to cross, or has the hole’s undeniable spin exerted on its victim a fatal fascination?...

My mother taught me most of what I know about writing by the time I was about twelve years old. Events seem to have proved she knew what she was doing: I’m now fifty novels into my career and...

“Don’t tell a patient that it will be okay.” Our nursing professor strolled the aisles of the cramped classroom one hand clutching her cane. The walls were dusty pink, and we sat at rickety desks, the kind where...

They thought they murdered me. Six boys stood above me with shovels, circling a mound of wet sand. I was buried under it, trapped. It’s weight pressed into my chest and pinned my arms...

My parents weren't art connoisseurs nor were they culturally clueless. My mother owned a Peter, Paul and Mary LP. Occasionally she would pull out a boxed set of La Bohème records...

“Are you mad at me?” I asked while slicing cucumbers at work. I had it down to a science. They had to be cucumbers-cucumbers, not squash or zucchini, because those spoke to the mandolin the best...

Children are signposts for those of us who give birth to them, adopt, or foster them, care for and teach them. They lead us all into “worlds" we may never have encountered...

Some Things That Have Stayed Pretty Much the Same Since I Was a Boy:
Snickers, The three broadcast networks, Alcohol content of beer...

Stephen King once wrote that there are easy reads, but there are no easy “writes.” When people respond with pearl-clutching to your book on Goodreads, you respond by liking their bad reviews....

There are few people who elicit strong enough emotions to write letters to. So maybe you’ll appreciate this, since you enjoy eliciting strong emotions just for the sake of it...

You're expecting wisdom. Some hard-won insight I'll be grateful for later, delivered backward through time like a telegram from the wreckage. If only I'd known. That kind of thing...

We were in the middle of our math lesson on the morning of Valentine’s Day when I felt a sudden energy shift in the fifth-grade classroom, the air bristled with an electricity that had not been there minutes earlier...

It’s entirely his fault he’s dead. That much, I think, is beyond question. He didn’t deserve a life to live out—at least, not the kind he pretended to lead. He earned his demise...

Her eyes are hidden behind their damp lids, blocking out whatever might enter her room this time. Tucked into the crook of Charlie’s arm, as if being strangled, is her stuffed penguin...

I reach into the shower, turn the shower knob to hot, wait a few seconds, and step in. Ahhh. Now how good does this feel? I close my eyes and rock myself, gently, side to side, letting the water rain over me. I close my eyes...

When I was young, I was lucky to be accepted into a Seven Sisters college in Massachusetts. In the 1970s I looked forward to escaping from under my parents’ roof...

On my last night as a student midwife, I donned my dread along with my scrubs. My car no longer smelled like weed. I had long since kicked the habit. When I arrived, tealights glittered in the birth suite...

The office was thinning out when Omer finished the last items on his list. His phone rang as he was slipping into his coat.

“Still there?” Emre asked...

Call me Johno. You watch enough movies, you come away with the idea that nobody has ever committed the perfect crime. Everybody, even the very smart and the very lucky, makes one mistake, and there’s always a detective with a bad marriage and a...

We’re interested in writing for its own sake, not based on who else loves you, so our contributor’s notes don’t list your past publishing credits or your esteemed education or accomplishments, as much as they may have helped...

The forest is pine-wood and flat. The kind with stag and pheasants, red and fat, flitting through the trees. The kind with long furrows—even scars that were once tilled by broken-backed villeins...

On our third date we met in the desert. I sat in the mass produced macrame swing hung at an awkward height with my legs sticking out at strange angles while Carol Cole played on the cheap...

I sat in the driver’s seat of the car, silently fuming as I watched my dad struggle to put on his seatbelt. With one mobile arm, he feebly reached...

WAY OUT OF town, beyond the Abbey and the seagulls, Eskdale lay sandwiched between an industrial estate and a thin slice of sixties housing. Every day I bumped-and-trundled in by train; my friend...

With the buffeting winds at your face, listen carefully for the tranquil trickle of the burn--a small creek--that runs down the hill right next to the old croft building....

What was it like to be considered a foreigner in your birthplace of Vienna because your father was from Turkey?...

On a blistering day in late July, a few weeks after my husband’s death, slightly maddened by fresh grief and by a jolting sense of possibility,...

Ever since my skating coach Cecilia said I wasn’t worth teaching and I wet my pants in my lesson, I’ve been lighting fires. Small fires, at first, double-ringed with stones...

Hank and I had been awake long enough that the apartment felt borrowed. It was a three month rental north of Prospect Park, probably one block into Greenpoint, but I still told people...