It must have been 9th grade for our history class was cancelled again, an indeterminate kind of “cancel” because it was Perestroika in 1989 in the USSR and our history textbooks were suddenly out of date. via Pocket

The rabbits are government-issued. Shambolic bunnies. Bunnies with smeary eyes, with a faintly sulfurous smell about them. Bunnies splotched with white fur on brown. Bunnies full of gumption munch through buckets of grass and weeds. Don’t anthropomo…

My lips are so bitten up it’s like my mouth just chewed its way out of my face. I think my mother is about to tell me about the divorce between her and my father. Guess my age, with my parents getting divorced. You’re wrong, add ten years. via Pocket

by Michelle Geoga Penelope was already thinking having some babies would make her feel better then she found one at the Kmart, a sleepy one with long dark lashes, tiny fist balls clen…

by Nina Sudhakar Into a shallow river, the holy tributary, we poured all of our ashes. Hard of bone and soft of soul: the remnants of our ancestors. The sandbar baked in the sun until…

by Michael Díaz Feito A frondy dog dictated to the things how to take my portrait (and Cnut, drooling sugar, videoed it): “Clip wool turf, mower. Peel then white mold, knife. Gravel t…

by Phoebe Reeves-Murray He became aware of colors swirling across the sky in front of him: purple, pink, green, yellow. He tried to touch them, but the curve of the sky bowed away lik…

by Kyle Hemmings Shortly before my girlfriend died, she asked me to take care of her pet dinosaur. It was the kind that flew–a Confuciusornis. For most of the time that we had …

by Brooke Reynolds Mary’s mother tells Mary to cut down her flowering tree, for it is barren and refuses to bear fruit. Mary tells her mother it is a flowering tree, with other purpos…

by Sylvia Schwartz A small girl is riding her bike back and forth, trapped in a long, rectangular enclosed box. She does not see that she is confined; her eyes are cast down at her fe…

by GJ Hart Done with remorseful tick and defiant tock and applauding foreheads and wonted theorems behind tremoring hands on grey-areas and Neptune’s one true pyramid, Denholme …

by Erin Jamieson Though our family lives in Ulaanbaatar, we knew we couldn’t bury Aab there. Not under the smoky hue that clogged the city skyline. Not beyond the ashy streets, the sa…

by Gay Degani Jennifer, “Jen,” as she preferred to be called, used to meet her neighbor, Howard, in Rocketship Park. They made a game of it. She would be in her jogging clothes, her f…

by J. Bradley I don’t know why my boys have never asked me where my old body went when I became what I am now. It’s like they expected this to happen, all my wrongs and sins poisoning…

by Omer Friedlander My parents had bought the first model of the Changing Home at a reduced price, when it was only an experiment. Our experience was used as a case study, to test it …

by Matthew Moffett If Sophie Brown were an artist, she’d sculpt her own body in clay, in various poses, life-sized and writhing in torment. Then, she’d exhibit the figures…

by Lisa Favicchia It had to be hot, because otherwise the snake head would not have been crispy like bacon on the outside, would not have retained its sheen long enough to be conceiva…