The Stories

M. Mrudhula

Each pill rolled out between my fumbling fingers, skin soaked through with sweat. As I dropped a pill on my tongue, another one dropped onto the heavy wooden floor.

Click. Click. Click.

I reached for the hard green pill, my hands shaking as I desperately tried to swallow the green pill in my mouth. A bit of my saliva welled up in my mouth and attempted to help to glide it down my dry throat. But the pill stuck.

Callie S. Blackstone

St. Sebastian, saint of archers, persecuted Christians, saint of holy Christian death. The saint goes shirtless, his pale body exposed and penetrated over and over by arrows, his smile welcoming the pain. St. Sebastian, saint of the gays and the sexual weirdos. Sebastian, the name I chose for my confirmation. I would think of him every time I got on my knees and they placed the wafer in my mouth, followed by the wine. When I told my mother my choice of name, she held my eyes for several moments before turning away, murmuring it was fine, but why couldn’t I pick St. Michael or St. Christopher, like the other boys did.

Joe Davies

The ideal day for a bike ride has little wind and no rain, and a temperature hovering close to 20℃. On just such a day one early June, a rider took the trail leading northwest towards Upton, the old rail bed of the K&M line, now groomed and largely underused. As he rode, the cyclist tried to remember to take in his surroundings. There were rolling fields sown with corn and other fields left open for grazing. There were marshy areas and stands of evergreens—spruce, pine, cedar. There were alleys lined with birch, others hemmed in by tall grasses. The grade of the trail was gentle, never anything beyond what a train might once have managed.

Laura Waldorff

I am writing to you because I have been awoken in the dead of night by the call of a bird. I wonder now if it was keeping me from wandering too far into my dream. The last image before my eyes was the path winding its dusty stones into a dark forest. And you, beside me.

Brianna Di Monda

When I first revisited my childhood home, it was after an absence of twenty-two years. My sister opened the front door, and I stepped through its threshold, intoxicated by the proximity of the past. Our home held souvenirs that had long been forgotten, that had been buried in the recesses of memory. A fine layer of dust covered the tabletops in the living room, where the nurse had set up my father’s hospice bed.

Alicia Ong

In a tournament like this, a third-place match like this, the stakes are only in name. I turn the television on, off, on again, irritated by the flicker. I decide that I’ll clear my backlog of emails and watch the match at the same time, it will make both things more bearable. There’s so much clutter in this bloody flat, wires crisscrossing on the feathery rug that the table has slanted and rumpled. The uncharged vacuum cleaner sits pretty at my feet, the fat glass cabinet is stuffed unevenly with files and medicine and god-knows-what. I’m not good enough at being an adult to do more than chuck things in compartments.