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(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
Each time one woman said dirty Rama's name, the others buzzed like black magnets in the embroidered sheets. Amma turned herself onto her belly as she laughed and pushed her neck back at the story of Rama and the Tupperware, the top of her sari momentarily giving way to the thing underneath it, and for a while, Chikoo watched as they moved up and down and up and down with her heavy breaths. Have you seen her V-neck blouses? Amma said. It made the women clap hands. She rolled her head into her chin as she whispered something horrible about that letter, and the girl knew her mother must be terribly intelligent because she had made the women feel that warm, spreading feeling one only got from gossip. Her mother was bad. Bad, just like her, having thoughts of shaking Kailash off the railing.
Divya Manikandan
Saving Mary Jane
(Spotlight Runner-Up!)
I'll go to Little Jo's. He's 12 like me, but he stopped growing. He has a disease making him fade away. I light a cigarette. My hands are shaking. I go into the field of long grass and wildflowers. I put a flower in my hair, which flows in the breeze. The sky is going on forever. I come upon something, a dead groundhog. Or maybe he's sleeping. I name him Edgar. Edgar, how was your life? Do you have memories? Do you have images in your mind of your wife and babies? Do you have a heaven? Momma says animals don't. You're better off.
Gary Moshimer
Her jaw makes her look like a more attractive version of Munch's "The Scream." The nurse compliments her on her bravery. They have told her they will sedate her, but as the minutes wear on, she gets more and more agitated from the horrible aching. I can't sit down, feeling an old tightness in my own jaw, and I hover on the edge of our doorway, looking for the nurse. I hear yelling and see a dumpy woman with bleached hair across the medical station weaving a little as she stands by her bed, on the opposite side of the circle of rooms. Three security officers converge on her.
Kathryn Pratt Russell
Dr. Moffett's Suicide Prevention Program
This rescue program was almost impossibly ambitious and highly controversial, as, in the process of breeding the perfect avian retriever, Moffett would create countless monstrosities so ill-suited for life they had to be put down immediately after being born. PETA had a field day, as you might expect. Upon Moffett's arrival, they set up an encampment in the town surrounding the University and from there incited a general frenzy amongst the townspeople, the faculty, the students—the entire country, it seemed, was outraged. Moffett himself was (forgive the pun) unflappable.
Sam Everick
The French art school Moreno was to attend was located in the northeastern part of the country, and he hated the region from the start. No sooner had he arrived did it begin to rain, and continued to rain with a dogged, unremitting persistence for an entire week. Even when the rain stopped, the sun never shone; then the grey winter clouds, with their damp and dreary weightiness, would only press down upon his head more and more, smothering him beneath their impenetrable mass. Gone were the tepid Andalusian winds, replaced now by violent gales slashing through his thin southerner's coat and chilling the marrow in his bones. The people, he found, were as cold as the weather, reserving all smiles, laughs, and friendly expressions, and the food, so fatty and colorless, seemed to have been infected by the greyness of the sky and rain-soaked city streets.
Michael Ross Dolan
"What are you working on?" she asked, taking care not to come too close to his easel. He hated having someone watch him paint. The house they were minding was located close to some of the prettiest harbors on Long Island, but he wouldn't budge from the clump of impatiens in the back yard. He sketched, painted, and sketched it again. If he didn't choose to show her his work, she did not dare look for herself, even if he was out for one of his midday strolls. Nor did it surprise her if, as now, he failed to answer her inquiry or replied with a wisecrack. She considered his talent justification for almost any disagreeable behavior.
Thomas J. Hubschman
We had been training Afghan Army then. Teaching every goat-fucking, chai boy-fucking, women-are-for-procreation-men-are-for-pleasure-moron out the mountain boonies how to count. You believe that? Growing up in the poor man's hills, half the recruits had barely attended any madrassa whatsoever. They might've recited Quran passages verbatim (though not understanding a lick of it because if they did understand a lick of Arabic they wouldn't have signed their lives away to a paper tiger army) but ask them to count out ten rounds of AK-ammo and you might as well have been asking them to drop a lecture on the linkages between game theory and mutually-assured destruction.
J.G.P. MacAdam
The revolution began in my limbic system.
John Carey
Elliott was a young man, would need to make his way in this mire for several decades more at minimum, and yet something felt wrong. He was lost. The train home screamed with mechanical rattles and human silence, a coffin car. And at home that night, why the same lifeless postures? Why did the evening pass in silence, only the television allowed to speak, his body and hers captured by invisible casings as if they were refrigerated sausages, and why did their eyes never meet?
Huntley Gibson Paton
A week later. I was halfway through Portrait of the Artist, and she smiled approvingly when I told her, "The man has a gift." But, on some level, even the most inveterate denier knows when they are kidding themselves. The most obvious tell—had I chosen to acknowledge it—was the imbalance in the way we absorbed each other's discourse. When Adrienne spoke of things literary, I listened with keen attention, even if it was only for fear of later saying something stupid. When I voiced my own miscellany, I often sensed a growing disengagement, as if her mind were tiptoeing elsewhere.
Dennis Kaplan
