Table of Contents

Chris Adrian – The Stepfather
    Our mother was supposed to marry Mr. Arnold.

Daniel Orozco – Somoza’s Dream
    The Presidente-in-Exile is falling.

Roddy Doyle – New Boy
    He sits.
    He sits in the classroom. It is his first day.

Philipp Meyer – One Day This Will All Be Yours
    My father grew up in a mining town in West Virginia; baths outside in a coal-fired tub, missing strikers found buried in the slag piles, the vein giving out and the whole town with it.

Alan Ackman – No Cry of Distress in Our Streets
    Reverend Daniels washes all his fruit in baby soap, because his doctors recommend it.

Adam Levin – Hot Pink
    My friend Joe Cojotejk and myself were on our way to Nancy and Tina Christamesta’s to see if they could drive to Sensei Mike’s housewarming barbecue in Glen Ellyn.

Edmund White – My Hustlers
    When I was seventeen I worked for my father in Cincinnati all one summer manning an Addressograph machine.

Rachel Haley Himmelheber – Happiness Reminders
    Early Christmas Eve morning, the cop rolls carefully away from the near-stranger sleeping beside him and types another happiness reminder of his new plans.

Yannick Murphy – In a Bear’s Eye
    She heard the bear. It hooted like an owl, only lower, sounding like an owl far down in a well or in a cave.

Joyce Carol Oates – Bad Habits
    They came for us at school. They didn’t explain why. In their faces was the warning Don’t ask.

Nelly Reifler – The Railway Nurse
    Becoming a railway nurse was not easy.

Joe Meno – People Are Becoming Clouds
    People are becoming clouds nowadays.

Deb Olin Unferth – Deb Olin Unferth
    No one in Wyoming thinks that Deb Olin Unferth is a fuckup.