Looking to catch up on our latest individual stories and essays? You’ve come to the right place.
Below are all the titles we’ve published (so far) this year. We’ll update the page every month with new stuff.
These gals next door, Maddie and Janine, though, I just don’t know. They sit out in the back yard in bathing suits, drinking beer, playing hoodlum music. Maddie all done up in cherry red and a kerchief on her head. They lay on those plastic tri-fold chairs next to the garden beds, put lotion on each other’s backs. Makes you sick.
He grinned and picked his rolled-up Sports Illustrated off his coffee table. This is step one, he said and swatted the wasp on the window. It hit square and the wasp fell to the floor, where there was already eight or nine others piled up. The window was covered in streaks from where he’d splattered them earlier. Step two, he said, is the strongest gin and tonic you ever had.
Kyle’s a sophomore, and is probably as unlike me as anyone can get. Taller, broad shouldered, with the legs of a soccer player and the arms of a home run hitter. His olive skin looks perpetually tanned, and his dark brown hair never fails to flop just so over his forehead. I should hate him, but I don’t, and for some reason he likes me.
The problem is, even when you know what it is, even when there is a perfectly benign and reasonable explanation, when you start seeing things—well, you've started seeing things. You're never sound in your judgment anymore because the line between healthy and not healthy is blurred.
She flooded me, communicated right there the most information that has ever been relayed with one breath—that she didn’t love me; wanted a divorce; was moving to Mexico City, where Mr. International worked. For reasons I couldn’t and can’t explain, I just nodded.
The whole therapy thing was my idea. I take ownership for my being there. I don’t enjoy it but I don’t think I’m supposed to. I don’t think I’m supposed to hate it, though, either. I think I’m supposed to find it gradually and progressively helpful. So far it’s hard to tell if it’s any help at all.
And then your name, announced without any fanfare, read aloud and without warning, in a honey-hued baritone, like the soothing voice of Jesus you’d heard so many times in your dreams. You were powerless to deny it—a servant to its call.
My sister shakes her head. She is a nurse, pragmatic, practical, always searching out the obvious. He loved you, she says, wanting to reach for my hand but resisting. Her fingers close gently into a fist on the table’s edge. He would have done it all over in a heartbeat. The exact words he used. Maybe she’d heard him say it.
A photo of your mother hangs on the wall outside your room. A black-and-white from when she was a dancer in the ’70s. The photo was taken before you existed and there are no other family photos in the hall. You feel like you have wrongly found your way into a stranger’s house.
“How about a drink?” he asks, and though she feels a little sick, a little bit woozy, she nods, because to say no would mean opening her mouth and to open her mouth would mean crying.
I come back into the bedroom just as Aunt Maritza’s coming out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her chest. It’s too small, and I can see the pale top of one thigh where the towel gapes open. There are five bruises there splayed out in the shape of a hand. I feel myself blush, and avert my eyes.
When it suits her, she pulls me in her wake and I’m flying: legs clumsy over uneven terrain, free hand pressed against the space between my ribs, willing myself not to trip or cough again. Mostly, though, as now, I’m the one straining ahead and it is her that’s slowing us down.
I passed the bag through, blocking the doorway with my boot. Four or five mice made it in over my toes. I apologized, but Oscar didn’t seem to notice. The floor inside was dark and pulsed with movement. They ran three deep along the molding. Oscar stepped out and pulled the door closed behind him, blocking my view.
Billy had dreams filled with the sound the railing must’ve made when her feet pushed off, the metal thrumming in the air, vibrating in a black and steadying blur. He thought she must’ve heard it, too, maybe all the way down.
When he lies on the mattress next to me, the knives are parallel to his shuddering heart. Then, and only then, he will begin his nightly ritual, running his fingers down my spine, latch by latch by latch.
NOMFICTION features sixteen pieces about food and life and everything in between, from David Burga, Jane Campbell, Rosa Campbell, Maggie Downs, Rebeca Dunn-Krahn, Deb Fleischman, Brianna Goldberg, Alisa Gordaneer, dee Hobsbawn-Smith, Madeleine Leznoff, Cindy Matthews, Lauren Razavi, Robyn Ryle, Vivek Shraya, Teri Vlassopoulos and Tanya R. Ward.
