Alice wasn’t asleep, but she was starting to dose with her phone glowing balanced on her chest, when she heard the scraping at her window. She’d left it half open, as much an invitation as a way to let in the autumn air…
Madison came home from school one afternoon to discover Lucky lying on the street in front of the house, bleeding and mangled. At first, she was sure her dog was dead, but Lucky opened his eyes and tried to lick Maddy’s hand…
The room’s perfect whiteness is infinity. Without variation, without shadow, the illusion of perpetuity is near-flawless. She waits on the tissue paper, legs dangling. From somewhere comes the soft ticking of a clock, though there’s no clock in the room…
“The last one.” The ship’s console lit up emerald green and the deepest of blue, colors that used to trigger an odd sort of nostalgia in Son, but lately only made him feel resentful. In the middle of the screen, a minuscule dot was steadily growing. Father’s voice soon followed from the speakers…
Artists thought they’d be the last ones laughed out of their professions by technology, yet they were amongst the first. What started as an amusing revolution of AI capabilities for content creators and web perusers was optimized to gain the attention of art critics and galleries…
The streetlight buzzed above the taco truck like a nest of angry hornets as it flickered in its death throes. Not unlike most neglected corners in Los Angeles, this particular stretch of downtown had been left to the bottom-feeders. At least down here, Enrique thought, the cops didn’t harass street vendors all that much…
Larkin set down her glass of spiced wine. She wrote Is truth pleasant? on a yellow legal pad. Ben, at the end of both his breath and his tether, watched her. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “I know it’s pitchy…
I was born on a conveyor belt. I remember rough hands, rap music blasting, and being shoved into a box. It isn’t a memory so much as a story, told to me so many times it feels like my own. But I was too busy screaming inside, my brain too busy growing, to truly know what was going on…
Live in the glamorous heart of Hollywood! Spacious bachelor studio. Shared utilities in a growing community. Close to nature with stunning natural light. Won’t last long! Jeff’s holding his phone across the coffeeshop table for me to read the listing…
The scuffed Plexiglas is hard to see through, but you can’t resist shuttering your eyes like using a View-Master to peer inside and look at your past. Like the wheel-card of slides in the stereoscopic toy, the scenes don’t change…
Mira was in a hospital gown looking at her phone. The girl with the bleach-blonde pixie cut had been tantalizing in her OKCupid photo, but when they met last week, she noticed the deep-pitted acne scars peppering her jawline and the glaring red spots on her cheeks and between her thick brows…
El resented her father for calling her home. She stood in the backyard, arms folded across her faded t-shirt, staring out at the rows and rows of dry, brown cornstalks against an empty blue sky…
The bike seat pressed against my thighs, the wooden housing of the camera banging against my deformed spine. I was grateful for the misty shroud over my face. Were the neighbors to see me, they would whisper…
A bleeding sun rears its angry head over the hills surrounding your childhood holler. You smudge a bit of dirt into your hairline and hurl your suitcase into the open trunk of your mother’s silver van, Mark glaring at you between the headrests…
It was a wet-fingered October morning, the air like a formerly-celebrated guest who refused to notice the repeated glances at the calendar, when Annilee Morgan Fox first performed real magic…
