Quinn Braverman had two secrets she kept from her husband. One was that the real reason she chose him over Eugene, her neurotic, self-loathing, semi-famous ex-boyfriend, was to prove her mother wrong. She could have a relationship with a normal, stable man. The other was that Quinn knew another life existed in which she had made the…

Author’s Preface This booklet was written after spending a week at an artist’s retreat on Ossabaw Island, a wild place of ocean, swamp, field, forest, alligators, armadillos, and hogs off the coast of Georgia. + Joseph lives in Baltimore, where he writes and makes text-based art. His book of microfiction, Easter Rabbit, was released by Publishing Genius…

Sometimes I imagine you return. You put your nose in my hair and you lie to me. “I love you,” you say. I knew something odd was going on. I noticed legs of men on both sides of my body, but I had no body. I was an invisible being, floating, with simply my capability…

Each winter, when Kansas City was cold, Twyla would forget what the city would become in the summer. By and by, July would come and, once again, she would be stunned. She would take to the couch in the lowermost room of the house and she would lie still and she would repeat to herself…

for Mary Ruefle Every time it starts to rain, I would like to have sex. I’ve felt this way since before I knew what sex was. When I was a child and it began to rain I removed myself quietly from the company of siblings and clawed off their hand-me-down hi-tops and out of their…

Don’t Look For Her Lost at a Renaissance Faire, surrounded by knights and maidens, for the very first time in my life I prayed. I was six years old, and I thought I’d seen my mother with the blacksmith. I prayed for my grandfather to find me. I prayed that no one would swoop down…

My niece was playing crazy eights with her friend from the other side of the cornfield. On her father’s—my brother’s—futon couch, I was trying to start reading a novel. This novel had my brother’s fervent approval. He’d taken it down from his shelves. He’d gripped its lower corners in both hands and straightened its edge…

PARKING LOT Thunder sounded, getting closer, and Justin picked up his pace, spearing trash off the road and dumping it into a gigantic plastic bag. By court order, he had to wear this glow-in-the-dark vest with the words Community Service on the back, and pick up the roadside litter tossed by the ecologically retarded citizens…

It had stopped raining. I saw a fox in the garden hide something. From where I stood it looked like a shoe with a foot still in it. I thought perhaps the fox wanted to hide the foot for his brood and he wanted it to rot a little because, who knows, perhaps foxes like…

Ty rented a tiller from True Value, lugged it in his truck, went out to the back and pushed, the tiller digging up the grass like angry antlers. He saw his neighbor John over the fence, waving with his gloves on. John was retired, and sometimes Ty saw him at the Eagles, a club for…

The sports gene I get from my dead father. He returns to me now as a scent. Water-logged leaves. He’s the tetherball attached to my pole, the flying trapeze of my soul. He runs a bar tab, then turns to me and says let’s hit the road, son. And when I argue with him about…

In court, he could not care less about the woman who was unable to make amends with her husband, and who weekly drapes herself across his grave and claws at the earth, fills her fingernails with sod. He does not care about the bereaved father’s desire to inscribe his own tombstone, “He died of a…