Explore

When I speak and wave my arms, it sniffs the air and watches me.

I felt that Teddy occupied a range below acceptability, even among boys.

Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.

I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.

It wasn’t me he was aiming at; he was using me to make my mom unhappy.

“Just sex,” I say, and the old feeling is back, the creeping nausea.

He sobbed; he said he would go to therapy, stop drinking.

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

Don’t send me home without a round of applause if not a title.

Lovers, a new set of six-word stories from Elizabeth Benedict.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.

We drove, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

When I was a child I once hallucinated that the laugh track was for me.

The everlasting shines through in the threshold between worlds.

I looked up how much everything would cost. Giving birth: $9,000.

You’re feminist? Neither one of you. You just like getting into fights.

Praise the ease of it: how simple it is to tell the dog he loves her.

Before April rings the chime, she forces her way up out of herself.

The blackness of her hair seemed to pull the color from her body.

The attendant instructs remember, immerse three times.

Fletcher was a squad leader. He ought to be able to get a girl.

If you tear down the web it will simply know this isn’t a place to call home.

Sundays, your wife at Mass, we locked ourselves in my room.

Third Place

Dad doesn’t believe I’m beauty queen material. I believe in myself.

He is not in the position to lose a friend. Not when one is all he has.

With your hands in the air you held an infant tightly, trying to save it.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.