Publication: X-R-A-Y

  • Outside Husband by Natalie Warther

    Does what it says on the tin. This is an unsettling story about living with someone who is losing the plot: One day he was coming into the house, sweaty from a long bike ride, kissing my neck so the kids would scream, the next he was fashioning my black thong into a slingshot and…

  • The Coin by Rose Hollander

    The narrator of The Coin is religious and her boyfriend Don isn’t, until he spends 10 minutes talking to the pastor. Hollander’s story contemplates the nature of logic and faith in a way that lingers long after reading. To Don, faith was a failing grade in a physics class. “If God wanted me to believe…

  • Swordfish Strips by Michael Brooks

    Swordfish Strips is told by a server at a swanky restaurant, as she low-key obsesses about a fashionable couple at one of her tables. The story surprises, and Brooks captures so many subtle details that are revealing about each character. Emily spots her strutting up to the hostess stand: a willowy curl of a woman,…

  • A Trail of Small Clowns by Caleb Bethea

    A surgeon has a troubling way of letting off steam from the stresses of work. I was not at all prepared for the body horror in this story, but it was just riveting, impossible to look away from. Given her line of work, I didn’t think she’d understand what it was like needing something to…

  • CLUSTER by Katherine Plumhoff

    Perennial fave Plumhoff writes about Laura who just lost her mother: People say they see their dead moms in blue jays and buttercups, robins and rhododendrons, but mine told me she’d never come back as something so abominably dull, and to keep an eye out for spiders. It’s a bit Tim Burton, and it’s lovely.

  • BREAKING by Emily Rinkema

    BREAKING is one of those stories that puts the reader off-balance in less than one sentence and stays there throughout. Here’s the first paragraph: On the designated day for punishing mothers, those of us who got our applications in early enough show up, mothers in tow. Most look like they came willingly, walking ahead of…

  • On the Nostalgia of Dried Apricots and Other Garbage

    This is a fierce piece of writing that hits like a sledgehammer: “The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures.” It reminds me of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, but the text…

  • This Mine of Mine

    One of the weirdest stories I’ve read recently, starts like this and gets weirder as it goes: You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house…

  • The Thing

    A great narrator’s voice on a fishing trip, and a lot more: So, this creature comes in and it looks like a caterpillar if the caterpillar was nine pounds and pink and gelatinous as a huge earthworm with flute holes along its side in the style of a woodwind instrument or an ocarina.

  • WE LOVE KIMBERLEY

    A woman whose quest to quit biting her nails has unexpected results. It’s funny and morbid, with a very unique narrator