Listen to Alice McCormick read “Follow the Signs”: Eons ago, when I was young, my family and I went yard sale-ing. That was what we called it. We started about Memorial Day and finished about Labor Day. On clear, sunny Saturday mornings when the hot dew boiled off the fresh lawns, all four of us …
In a fit of New Year’s can-do-ism, Victoria promised herself she’d find love by the end of the weekend. She waited for her Friday date, sipping the lightest beer that Hound and Wolf served, which compensated with cherry flavor for what it lacked in proof. It tasted like expired children’s medicine, was impossible to drink …
The contours of the storage unit concerned the Oligarch. He had wrested a desk chair from under an ottoman and a heap of beanbags bright like succulent fruit. It must have been midmorning by then, the insulated silence of the unit a dawn chorus. He yawed and swiveled, thinking about wrinkled things—not just metal, but …
The windows in the choir room were welded shut. It was just as well; the view was all feet and dirt. Absent natural lighting, the dozen or so of us huddled under an antique fan, broken, with three flickering yellow light bulbs to read our sheet music. I was still new enough in my position …
I The position was tenure-track, the pay good. Great even, when you considered cost of living. The university would even provide a studio. Chava had never lived in the Bible Belt, the Deep South, but she was done with Boston, its frigid winters and people, this flu-like thing that she’d had for the past four …
I It was three days after Christmas when I came home from work and found the gift bag leaning up against my door. “Love, Aunt Gloria,” read the card in her spidery cursive script, the kind that stymied children. I pulled a tin of cheap mint chocolates from the bag. Frango was stamped in bloodred …
Winner of the 2024 Robert and Adele Schiff Award in fiction At night I kept my Jesus folded small in the corner of my closet, arms under tucked knees, dark mangled locks beneath the cotton dangle of buttoned shirts I didn’t wear. That’s where I charged him too. Anywhere out in my room would have …
In the days following the tragedy, after the funerals were over and even the local papers had moved on to other stories, Albert stopped leaving the house. For a couple days he put on a performance for his father, who was on bereavement leave from the university, where he was a professor on the history …
On the night of the break-in, I was upstairs painting my daughter’s bedroom. I hoped Erin would see it as a surprise, a kindness, but with kids, you never know. The week before she’d asked us to paint her room ocean blue, and I’d said that was too dark a color, that she’d regret it, …
We’re driving the largest cleanup in history. . . . We let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.—Boyan Slat Dear Boyan Slat, Honestly, I thought it was beautiful how after the rain drenched everything, the creeks rummaged through the holler, coaxing out all the plastic milk jugs and Clorox …