At the height of the COVID shutdown in the United States, I was asked to speak at an informal recovery meeting by a friend I had met ten years...
Prose
Browse submissions from past editions, web exclusive content, author Q&A, and more.
The Magic Bangle | Shastri Akella
Kartik makes a decision the day his father strikes him: on workday evenings and weekends he’ll pretend he’s a tourist in his hometown. His real...
The Lilac Issue Editor’s Note | Kate Bernheimer
This Editor’s Note has three parts. As with all of my Editor’s Notes, I ask that you daydream while you read it. My students are often delighted...
Before | Joy Baglio
Let’s talk about the fairy godmother, before. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice,...
The First Time that the Trees Began to Walk | Wendy Dinwiddie
The first time that the trees began to walk, Mae wore pink onesies and couldn’t yet talk. She lived with her mother at the end of the road, and they...
The Listening Tree
What made me want him? That supple, brutal kingsnake of a boy, wine-lipped and longhaired.
Genie in Pieces
Father is the name for what guards the front door. The world outside is full of noise. A truck, a lawnmower, a dog, and then another.
Avenue
The doctor delivers the diagnosis. He tells Gulisa, ‘It could be worse.’
Diptych: The Bunch, Your Duck/Dog
One day, we came home from a walk in the woods and found something waiting for us. It wasn’t a this, or a that, or a they; it was a bunch.
Of Humankind
On a dirt street, in a one-room shack with a rain-tempered roof, lived a woman who sold sex to the workers of her district, and she did this because of all the ways one made money in the hard-mouthed world, this was the easiest for her.
