“Looks like an alien,” my son said of the horseshoe-crab shell: translucent, fragile, dwarfed by his palm.
“You’re not wrong. They evolved in a world different from ours.”
“Shouldn’t we clean it up?” he wondered of the carapace-littered beach.
“Let the waves take care of everything. How about ice cream?”
Tim Boiteau is a Writers of the Future winner and Editor at Every Day fiction. He is the author of the novel The Nilwere (Grendel Press, 2024).
Marriage fails. Diamond falls out. Stone resembles tinsel crushed after another drunken Christmas. Not so fast, mother says. Diamond is not metaphor. Pair it with a nice gold chain. Same gem, different context. Pendant arrives; oh my chained neck. Locked in mother’s jewelry box ever after, it sparkles at nothing.
Cheryl Snell’s books include poetry and fiction.
The surgeon cracked open the cocoon that was your ribcage and held your heart in his hands. He cradled it cautiously, cupping his palms as if encircling a fluttering moth. I cannot remember what he told me after—only the sound of his voice breaking when he said your name.
Jennifer Stitt is a PhD candidate in US intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her writing has appeared in Aeon, Aura Literary Arts Magazine, Chronically Lit, Essay Daily, Guernica, On Being, Public Seminar, and other places. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is currently working on a book about the history of solitude.
Travel had been costly, the funeral a blur.
He couldn’t recall why they’d become estranged.
A tug on the lead prompted him to release the Yorkie to belt along the lane and off into the snow-trimmed shrubs.
Movement snatched his eyes to the starkly camouflaged magpie.
Its croak seemed commiserative.
Irish writer Perry McDaid lives in Derry under the brooding brows of Donegal hills which he occasionally hikes in search of druidic inspiration. He even finds it on occasion.