Tim Walker/Creative Nonfiction
Dana enters the aviary carefully, closing the door behind him. The plover chicks, alert but unafraid, watch him with eyes like obsidian beads. He strews a handful of hoppers on the floor for the chicks to chase down. A few hoppers escape through the aviary’s mesh, and Cris’s free-range chickens snap them up. Like the snowies, the chickens have been watching us and waiting for our bounty of juicy arthropods.
Donna D. Vitucci/Fiction
I'm Priscilla *** The Sacred Thread by Donna D. Vitucci Seated Learning he ghosts watch us quietly, for what else have they to do? Our lives exasperate them. The children have never minded their elders,...
Alexandra Stanislaw/Creative Nonfiction
Vladimir Chuchadeev *** Dreams of Decadent Grief by Alexandra Stanislaw ou imagine your suicide – the faux porcelain bathtub brimming with sudsy water, milky swirls kissing your breasts, the bulge of...
Shelly R. Fredman/Creative Nonfiction
There are birds here, and butterflies making their way between the flowers in the garden. Lilacs thick with honeybees, and goldfinches too. Brailsford knows all of the names of the flowers. I only know the sounds of the birds and study their different voices, their constant songs that tell me, always, it will be all right.
Paul Sohar’s Budapest
On relative scale of time anything is possible, because motion measures its own time; for instance, there’s plenty of time for these two to stop acting like wax figures and jump on me right here, knock me down and rob me of my local i.d. papers, money, credit cards, my cell phone, my room key card, and what else? My life? It’s a good thing I left my US passport in the room. But what if they force their way into my room?
Wendy Stewart/Creative Nonfiction
We’re worrying, Barb and I, about paying our rent that month. We’re making light of it, but it’s on our minds. We run through ludicrous job possibilities. We fantasize about our secure professional futures and about how it should be possible, right now, to borrow a little against those —“pay you back when we’re 45!” (just to pull an unthinkable age out of the air)—but we know we’re both going back to waiting tables. We know that the tips we earn this weekend will get us through.
Kelly Gammon White/Travel
All photos by Kelly Gammon White Inishbofin Island, off the coast of Connemara in the West of Ireland. A great place to walk, if you keep an eye out for sheep and such. *** Why Ireland? By Kelly Gammon White [dropcap style="font-size: 46px;...
Carmen Firan/Commentary
If Trump wins he promises to deport about 11 millions of these immigrants and to build a big, insurmountable wall on the Mexican border and only let in immigrants with exceptional abilities, able to graduate from colleges like Harvard, Yale or Princeton…he hasn’t mentioned as of yet if they need be blond and blue-eyed, but the campaign is still ongoing. Other candidates are silent as to their plans in handling illegal immigrants out of fear of confronting their electorate with controversial topics. Border States like Arizona, Texas and New Mexico take this subject to heart. Illegal immigration is also connected with drug trafficking, violence and other crimes, which, while controlled by the government as much as possible, creates fear and resentment in the local population.
Michelle Terry/Creative Nonfiction
Valerie Brown Photo Pickin' Wildflowers by Michelle Terry y Grandma Leona was not a classic Depression-era beauty. Her harvest-browned skin and murder of jet-black hair were an arrant...
Renée E. D’Aoust/Creative Nonfiction
Mom’s current oncologist says, and I paraphrase: “I’m sorry for what we had to do to you in 1977 to treat breast cancer. We were very aggressive. And I’m sorry that the radiation you received as an infant probably caused cancer.”
Laurie King-Billman/Creative Nonfiction
He turned off the radio and began to speak with his storytelling tenor voice, developed to go along with his drumming where his group were often prize winners.
Blood Sport/Steve Bromberg
The smell of death lingers on the savannah. Big Game hunting is a sight to behold. It’s the ultimate expression of the hunter’s feelings of alienation and inadequacy and his frustration with interpersonal relationships. Now, with the discovery of the illegal killing of Zimbabwe’s beloved lion Cecil, “sport” killing has become a searing hot topic.
Virtuous Liar/John Ballantine
The tales of woe were woven into a more elaborate tapestry. The logic of economy and the politics of those who didn’t vote…the shape of our world.
Tonya K. Dale/Creative Nonfiction
I know why the dog next door cries at night. He’s the black-and-white mutt, the shaggy prisoner of a fenced-in portico…four feet by four feet. Cement floor.
No one is home, usually, where he lives, except for him. And so he talks to himself, and me, and the other neighbors.
Stephanie Golisch/CNF
Blue Eyes slinkily stares me down like he’s caught me shoplifting and he’s going to let me walk out of his store with whatever I want. His impish grin is like callused hands tickling my neck. I immediately tell myself I’m imagining things. I’m the sweatiest, smelliest and most disheveled I’ve ever been in my life…
True Tales of a Fictitious Spy/Excerpt
After all, everyone knows that in the murky, topsy-turvy world of espionage nothing is what it appears to be; what appears to be an ordinary stray visitor to a layman may indeed be a high-ranking intelligence officer.
A Legacy of AIDS / Molly Krause
I was listening to the radio, making a sandwich, when I heard that Eric Duncan had died. I lost my appetite. Media coverage of Duncan, the first known Ebola patient on American soil, had been reminding me of another patient I hadn’t thought of in years—Ryan White. A sick feeling came over me when I heard Ryan died, too, back in 1990…
Steve Bromberg / Life Always Seems to Surprise Me
The last time I was in Vegas I lost. Dr. Heart Stat!
What does it mean to be at that moment between the last breath and nothing, when everything slows down just before it ends and you know it’s the end and you see yourself for who you really are. Can you imagine? Really see yourself for the first time and think holy crap and then think wait! I can’t go yet…