Fiction

I want to name a girl baby Nougatine. Because French. I don’t know what it means, maybe some sort of candy, which would be like calling a baby Caramel or Skittles or Bubble Gum, but those aren’t French. And I don’t have a baby to name anymore. I give the name a test run by …

I met Ivan in Cuba, three years before I quit kayaking and nearly a decade after my brother—Jack—and I found the man in the canal. We were in Havana to qualify for Worlds. It was 1989, and the sport had begun to sour for me in the heat of Jack’s glory, so instead of spending …

Maybe she’d known some other Rumpelstiltskin. He’d never met anyone else with his name, but it was possible. Not probable, but still. Maybe she’d known a few other people with the name and just took a wild stab at it. She had three guesses, after all. It wasn’t like she got it right out of …

Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Katz’s crisp prose takes us up, up, and into the naturalistically surreal. As we ascend and then descend, quiet revelations about belonging and home come to the forefront. Listen to Katz read her miCRo: On the Ridge We went walking in the ranchlands looking for a petrified log. Let our feet …

IKEA was terrifying. Striking and bright, people juking and bumping. Sharp, hard edges. Intersecting geometric shapes. Endless rooms of feng shui’d minimalist low-set furniture, color-blocked retro yellows and oranges. I wished I had a shell. Fucking Kevlar shell—vest, helmet. Rifle. Goddamnit, I wanted a rifle. Can you imagine clearing this? I didn’t say it out …

After my cousin canceled her wedding, Dave and I still decided to go. We had invested too much in the idea of it, plus a new dress, a room reservation at the small New England inn, a route to peep at the changing leaves on the way in and way out of the state. We …

Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: It’s not always easy to pinpoint the exact moment a transition occurred, so in today’s miCRo—a story where the narrator’s juvenile concerns are abruptly interrupted to honor a long-standing tradition—we are urged to revisit the family events we uphold and how they can crystallize into an extensive sense of loss. Listen …

There’s nothing much wrong with the Bridgeway Motor Court. The carpet in Coleman’s room is dappled with burn marks, and the exterior wall, the one with the windows, has these psychedelic zigzags at the bottom, like somebody’s kid was left to run their crayons back and forth over the same spot, rubbing them down to …

They had been building a small radio at home, a very simple circuit that would draw the AM band into it and play voices and music through a pair of Bake-lite headphones—like those used in foxholes during World War I. The boy’s father had been taking vocational classes at the factory where he worked, to …