The Tango Lesson
Tracy Picha
He is so deliciously close to me, I can smell the scent of his shampoo. Dark ends of his hair still clustered and damp. His skin is so invitingly smooth, it looks like he just shaved in a hot shower.…
Category:Creative Nonfiction
My Debut
Robert Cataldo
When I was in my sixteenth year, a friend of my father’s, who worked for the state, came by my father’s store and had mentioned that the state psychiatric hospital in Waltham was looking for a piano player, a musician, to entertain their patients, one night a week, midweek. My father, of course, immediately thought of me. ...
Deaf Date
Paul Hostovsky
She was my sign language teacher. It wasn’t until the end of the semester that I’d finally learned enough signs to ask her out. And even then I wasn’t sure if I’d asked her out on a DATE or on…
Cans and Cant’s
Arkadiusz Prysak
The rising sun shines thin and white across a small kitchen in Opole, Poland. Eli Sigmund, a ten-year-old boy sits at the breakfast table, waiting. His mother anxiously paces back and forth, frantically packing suitcases for Eli’s father and his…
The Revolution of What Didn’t Get Said
Steve Almond
In the fall of 2012, just a few weeks before the last presidential election, I flew from Billings, Montana to Denver. Shortly after takeoff, I heard the man behind me announce that he and his wife, who sat beside…
Edges
Liam Cetti
The wind whips my hair as I saunter along the uneven sidewalk. I brush it back with my hand, and then look up at the church building I’d just escaped. My family sits inside, absorbing the thundering words of the…
Minnie Mouse
Raven Baksh
Goddamn, she is some sort of hot today. What is it? Like, nine thousand degrees out? All these sun burnt people with their sun burnt children don’t seem to be bothered… With their bare chicken legs out and their little…
Bridges
Jennifer Andrews
She stands on a steel girder, her feet hooked around its ice edge, her hand wrapped tight around a cabled wire, her body, pulsing, pulsing in the wind.
Nicole
Kelly Abrams
The air was crisp, and winter was finally settling in. The air smelled of snow, though I knew it would never come. Because my friend had been admitted to the hospital the night before, I’d slept at my mother’s side,…
Matilde and the Monster
Fernando Montiel Sanchez
On a warm fall day that smelled of earth and rain, Matilde stood in the middle of the backyard with her husband, Fernando, trying to figure out a game for their children to play—a game that would not frighten them.…