They called him Zaidy, although he was as unlikely to be a grandfather as a father. But the children flocked to him, when there were children. He had a way about him, a simplicity, that made him a bit childlike himself. He spoke clearly, with loud spaces between each word, as though he were always …
Your elderly father has mistaken his $4,000 hearing aid for a cashew and eaten it. This simple event contains multitudes: sorrow and entitlement and love and annoyance. It also contains the four separate appointments—assessment, hearing test, fitting, programming—you made and took him to in order to get the hearing aid in the first place. He’s …
You have a hunch that one of your coworkers at the small academic press is troubled. You have this uncanny ability to sniff out the troubled, and you feel comfortable only around them—the unabashedly troubled, the masochistically troubled, the adorably naive about the extent of their troubles. With a desk situated just behind your coworker’s, …
They were younger than I, but it didn’t matter that much. We had all stopped growing up. There was a pair of them in a two-room apartment over my head. At first, their clomping around and the like had driven me crazy, but nothing made them quit, so eventually I joined them. They had ragtag …
“My roommate’s in Nebraska, but you can’t tell anyone.” This was the most serious I’d seen Alex. His voice a whisper, his words hardly breathed into my jaw. Eve must have been in real shit. “What’s she doing there?” We were glued together in his twin bed. We’d decided to spend spring break in his …
What can starting over even mean? “Check yard signs,” the realtor says to me and Daniel when we’re looking at houses in North Carolina. “Which signs are people sticking in their front yards? That says everything about the neighborhood.” Everything emphasized, everything pointing to subtext she doesn’t trust we’ll get because we’re northern and, this …
Neil had volunteered to cook. Inez’s best friend, Beach, was coming in from the West Coast, and she felt he could use a home-cooked meal. Inez and Beach dated briefly in college, and while Neil hadn’t unriddled all the details of their breakup, the short of it was that they preferred each other’s company in …
On the first of the month, she miscarried in the shower. At her last checkup the ultrasound tech on duty had told her that her baby was about the size of a baby rabbit. It felt strange to hear that, because they usually compared the size to some kind of fruit or another type of …
Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: Today’s miCRo reimagines a cautionary tale as something more wholesome. There are no villains in this story, but it should not be read as an attempt to launder the wolf’s image. The story identifies the wolf’s appetite in the original Charles Perrault fairy tale as a source of strife, and although …
Associate Editor Andy Sia: Shikhandin’s haunting story pays mind to possession: what we own, what we do not own, and what we feel owed to. Clothing—a metonymy for inheritance—is a spectral presence in the piece, constellating around the body, cinching, draping, slipping. Amid the maw of loss, the piece crescendos toward the end in a …