by Ben Connell

“As soon as I touched down I was slapped by the heat. I saw a bloke on a scooter with a dishwasher strapped to his back, no word of a lie. Cages full of chickens, horns blasting and funky smells. Pure rabid carnage.”

by Kyle Cox

“He had picked the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He loved animals. She remembered him once, after, going on about jaguars and how strong their bite was.”

by Hank Kirton

“On July 4th she decided to clean her impossible apartment, despite her hangover. Bob's stupid drum set still sat splayed shamelessly in the comer like a homicide victim.”

by Andrew Rai Berzins

“Most of us do things of which we are not later proud. Ghosting a lame date. Prompting an avalanche. Sinking a continent. Or sitting back – beer in hand – dispassionately amused by the antics of idiots…”

by Richard Grayson

“Outside P.S. 15, half a dozen neighbors were gathering the way people do when there’s both danger and uncertainty – half hoping for news, half hoping there isn’t any.”

by CR Widen

“There is a haze over our community- not just the smoke, mind you, but spiritual, a malaise, a sickness. We are missing something fundamental, or perhaps there is a wound we cannot see…”

by Harry Del Monaco

“Legend has it, when the watch stops ticking, the world stops.”

by Jacob Wrich

“Kong is, in fact, the Christ figure. We misunderstand his attempts to save Ann Darrow, the beautiful symbol of mankind’s lost innocence. And because we don’t understand him and his quest to save humanity, we must kill him.”

by James A. Knight

“Steven Porter was found dead in an alleyway, during the winter of 2012. He fell from a window of his fourth-floor town house in Kilburn. The fall shattered his skull, leaving a lake of blood. The red lake was covered in a light dusting of snow.”

by Arjun Razdan

“There is only one Time, and this Montre is its Prophet.”

by Nana T. Baffour-Awuah

“That day, as I laid my best friend to rest, I buried his God too. And I found mine.”

by Jennifer Benningfield

“When I die, I just hope someone worth a damn gives a damn.”

by Melvin Sterne

“I deduce from this that he was not popular in high school or especially good at sports – all traits that channel people into police work like here at the agency.” 

by Brandon Yu

“Some of them take severed ears, scalps, and thumbs from dead VC and make necklaces out of them, which—even I have to admit—is a little tacky.”

by Arthur Aronstein

“There were giant marble vulvas, impressionist fungal stalks with colorful throbbing veins, clitorises crafted with coils and still-life circumcisions. Patrons surveyed these works with hands over their children’s eyes, jaws slack, none stopping to look at the painstaking detail invested in each one.”

by River Lucero

“And anticipation together, like sharing blood and breath together and shimmering in your chests together and BOOM! And BOOM!”

by Ace Boggess

“The fight started right in front of her in the pasta aisle. Mary Ellen wasn’t close enough to hear if words had been exchanged…Everything was political, even the act of picking out linguini.”

by Zary Fekete

“He calls the future water alive. She looks down at the rope-burned rim of her jar and thinks, Alive isn’t always the same as easy.”

by Alejandro Gabriel Leopardi

“Elena’s gone, and she’s not coming back…She left a clear reminder that happy people aren’t happy. Not all the time.”

by Ronita Chattopadhyay

“She was done with being quiet and submissive. “I will become tough,” she said out loud. She gulped down the remaining water. And then she noticed it – a crack at the bottom of the glass.”