Dr. Blue
By Anne Panning

A young nurse comes to tell you it doesn’t look good.  Your father’s knees buckle, and he almost falls into the industrial coffee maker that has kept you all going for weeks.  “It’s time to say your good-byes,” the nurse says. 

The Hard Part of Community College
By Heal McKnight

 “Your students just disappear sometimes,” my friend Richard told me when I took the job. “You never know why. They’re just completely gone. It’s the hard part of community college.”

Hang 'Em High
By Philip Gerard

It was back in the days when every little boy in America owned a toy six-gun and our national character was formed in half-hour TV episodes.

On Narratives
By John Warner

The trick, the therapist tells my father, is to construct a scenario, a narrative that encompasses all of the pictures. Discrete bits of information are hard to hold on to. Stories we can hold forever.

Almendras
By Brenda Peynado

The summers when I would go to Dominican Republic loaded with stories of my parents' past, I tried to excavate their lives, but everything had changed, the people had aged, the places were gone.

Candy
By Diane Seuss

When he led me to his bedroom and I saw the Playboy centerfolds papering the walls,my eyes widened and my mouth opened like I was Bluebeard’s young wife entering the forbidden closet where her predecessors hung from meat hooks. 

There Are Things Grandpa Doesn't Know
By Dylan Brown

In the living room, Bob tried to connect the RCA cable for his new video game system while workers set up a hospital bed in the study for Nancy.

A Burkinabe Man
By Kara Garbe Balcerzak

If you were a Burkinabe man, one of the good ones, you might make friends with the American woman who just moved to your remote village.

Simple
By Kerrie Kemperman

The days seemed infinite, the car rides long and tortuous, summers stretched on and on like the hums of cicadas.

On Fire
By Sheila Squillante

At breakfast this morning a story about forty-three children dead in a Mexican daycare fire.

Something of the Light
By Margaret L. Whitford

“He wanted to take my photograph right after we’d made love. He said I was so beautiful, even after having four children,” my mother continues.

Family
By Samuel Autman

That fall Aunt Toad lay in a casket with hair stacked too big. She wouldn’t have wanted people to see her hair like that.

SR-9
By SJ Sindu

It stings the back of your throat, something sweet on the top of your mouth, the underbelly of your tongue.

Still Things
By Amy Butcher

I smeared the translucent goo on a piece of glass thin as a fingernail, secured the slide in place and zoomed in and out.  I liked to watch the colors change. 

Surrender
By Nina Boutsikaris

That family, that poor family, my mother keeps saying on the short ride home. I twist in my seat and watch the berries bouncing in the back.

Our New Idiot
By Melissa Delbridge

“C’mon, Hardy,” I said. “You know that quarter is worth five times the nickel and you know we all watch.  Why do you just take the nickel?”

NEW BOOK REVIEWS, CRAFT ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS

In our Craft Section, Jill McCabe Johnson looks at literary olfaction (along with a fun quiz) , Jennifer Bowen Hicks reflects upon transparency of thought in the essay, and Jill Talbot (along with her creative nonfiction class) offer up an interview with Ryan Van Meter.

On our Book Review Page, Cara Carroll reviews Sheril Kirshenbaum's The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us; Melissa Cronin reviews Darin Strauss’s Half a Life; Jennifer Bowen Hicks reviews Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now; and Cassandra Kircher reviews Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century.