For expediency’s sake I am writing this love letter to you, and to you, in duplicate, because there were two of you, D. and N., and neither of you knew of the other, — that is, neither of you knew at the time that the other was also my lover — though you were friendly acquaintances, and both of you knew my husband to about the same degree.
“Forgive Me!” by Joyce Carol Oates Read More »
The evenings were ghastly. Miriam fancied that he was persecuting her in all manner of ways. For one thing he was deceiving her about the size of his paycheck. Also he was having affairs with other women. One of these fictitious paramours of Anthony’s was the church-organist. At this suggestion Anthony was particularly horrified, for the musician to whom his wife referred was a stout woman of forty-odd with a goiter.
“A System of Wheels,” by Tennessee Williams Read More »
Once, on the bus in seventh grade, she’d grabbed my contest-winning self-portrait and held it out the window while we drove down Fountain Street. Kids laughed. I grabbed a binder from her shoulder bag and tried to do the same thing. It was heavy. I dropped it. The binder’s contents—lined paper, neon Post-its, a package of metallic pens—spilled onto the road, causing an old woman thirty yards behind us to swerve to avoid them.
“Needs,” by Beth Thompson Read More »
When the American ships arrived, they looked like giant white women swimming towards us on the horizon. American marines shouted orders from the crooks of the ships’ pale elbows, readied guns in the corner of vicious smiles. I was pushing Pablito’s stroller on el Malecón, and the people around me said, Look, what is that? But I knew. I had seen them before, decades ago in the first invasion.
“American Ships,” by Brenda Peynado Read More »
* fiction by Courtney Sender, excerpted from MQR 53:2, Spring 2014 * Look, the truth of the way of the world is that David loves Moira enough to move to the middle of Nothing, England, for her, and Moira doesn’t love David enough to pick up the goddamned phone.
All David wants to do is warn her:
“We Can Practice Starts,” by Courtney Sender Read More »
* fiction by Amber Burke *
In the white bathroom light, she can see all the orange hairs poking out of her arms and her legs. She stares at the ring on her finger, the ring Bruce bought her last night on an installment plan, gold-gold with a fleck of diamond inside a flower shape.
“Jesus Christs Forever,” by Amber Burke Read More »
It was the first two boys in the classroom at 8:25 who started tapping the glass of the cage. “Kirby’s dead!” one of them shouted—later she couldn’t remember who it was, though she was sure Michael Curtis had been in the class that year, and he’d have been the type to shout, the type for drama. “He’s like this,” Michael said, lolling his tongue out and choking himself.
“Dead Turtle,” by Rebecca Makkai Read More »
Theobald Kristeller settled into his chair in the early printed text room of the British Library. The reading area was deathly quiet, save when one of the youngish, gung-ho librarians stumbled upon someone not using one of the book cradles properly, or writing notes in pen. Theo had himself once been upbraided for letting a first edition of Robert Persons’s De Persecutione Anglicana slip into his lap. “But it’s Persons!” he had exclaimed incredulously. “No one cares about Robert Persons!”
“Sonnet 126,” by Doug Trevor Read More »
* fiction by Kelsey Ronan *
Behind her, Tianna laughs. “Listen to her,” she guffaws. She repeats “dark with anguishhh,” in her white girl voice, the words theatrically elongated. “Who you tryna be?” Tianna’s laughter ripples around the room. Monae turns quickly back and stares down at her desk. Her face burns. Miss McCorkle ineffectively repeats, “Students, students,” but all the eighth graders are so relieved to be pulled away from this impossible poem and given something familiar to ridicule that they laugh and laugh.
“The Fireside Poets,” by Kelsey Ronan Read More »
* fiction by Charles Baxter *
With a tiny advance from a publisher and a six-week deadline, she felt like a caged animal hopping on electrified grates for the occasional food pellet. Her professional reputation was at stake: after this volume was published, she would probably be held up to ridicule in the New York Review of Books for her translation of this very poem. She could already see the adverb-adjective clusters: “discouragingly inept,” “sadly inappropriate,” “amusingly tin-eared.” One of the few Americans who had any command of this dialect, she belonged to a tight little society full of backbiters.
“Forbearance,” by Charles Baxter Read More »
