Second Prize: Chicken Soup

Athanasios Lazaro

It was a cool, crisp evening. The golden sun was setting over the distant horizon, painting the clouds red. Blood was spurting from the mutilated stump of the chicken’s twitching neck, painting the trees red. Life is a fragile, serious thing, is it not? ...

Third Prize: Blankey

Myra Molloy

I love my Blankey
She is green and pink and blue
Blankey loves me too ...

Alone, Together

Nicholas Combs

I am alone. Warm bodies surround me, preventing me from moving around in the cramped, humid subway car. The scents of trash, smoke, and human odor, mix together. I’m trapped in it, unable to get outside my own overworked mind.…

Third Eye

Lizzie Fasana

Clenching a pencil in his hands, my father begins to explain the size of my brain tumor. His fingers tremble as they trace the pencil’s lead, its bitten edges. His glazed eyes are transfixed on its exposed wood and its…

Deliver Him From Evil — The Birth And Death Of Addiction

Abby N. Wright

As winter turned to spring, dirt-encrusted snow melted into patches of flattened grass. Hunter sat inside his Honda Civic with his best friend Eve—a YMCA parking lot serving as that night’s drug venue. “Here, dude, try this. I just stole…

City of Promise

Jillian Schedneck

Every Tuesday and Thursday at dawn, I rode the 57 Bus into Kenmore Square–home of Fenway Park, the Citgo Sign, and Landsdowne Street, the center of Boston’s nightlife. By the time the sun peaked through the gray buildings on Commonwealth…

A Perfect Encounter

Jake Bennett

We met at a party. The kind of place I imagined many relationships form, without much hope of lasting. But our relationship was different. Certainly we believed it was. I suppose the main reason for this was that I was…

Topography

Douglas W. Milliken

Sometimes—while hiking stretches of the Appalachian Trail, while driving cross-country, while forging new relationships—I imagine myself an explorer discovering inhabited lands. I imagine myself surrounded by plants I have never seen, mountains I have never climbed, rivers I have never…

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.…

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. ...