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In the backseat the sister, who will one day become a sodden wife occupying the largest house in a college town, hits her younger brother. He reacts without thinking and punches her back: one solid thump on her gingham thigh. Indignation, stronger because it is unjustified, singes the sister’s pale complexion. Although she is in [...]

Julie found it a nice distraction from death to fixate on her engagement ring.

The young nurse, in seafoam green, asks me to rate my pain on a scale from 1 to 10.

Flash Fridays: The dress shrugged, a very Italian shrug, and then, almost causally, one sleeve rose as if to slit the seam in the other.

She called my father at work. “I don’t know if we’re downwind. Are we downwind?”

“Do you have a mask?” she asked.

After nearly six months of living in exile, her impulses have become dangerous and unpredictable. She hasn’t seen him in weeks, but she knows he’s there.

Inspired by the Richard Brautigan story, I Was Trying to Describe You.

The land froze nine months of the year. Any winter dead had to wait until spring to be buried.

A few of us stuff in before the subway doors pinch shut. A man slides his hand down the pole, clearing a place for me to hold.

Just as the sun dipped behind the water tower, Lupe and Maria materialized in the street outside their trailer, fully formed, wearing oversized t-shirts and scuffed up plastic kneepads.

The abbé stands beside me whispering prayers and the man from the court asks again if I have anything to say…

A special from-the-archives edition of Flash Fridays, here’s Jamie Quatro’s “Caught Up” from our recent Ecstatic issue… The vision started coming when I was nine. It was always the same: I was alone, standing on the brick patio in front of our house, watching thick clouds above the mountains turn violent shades of red and [...]

I always cared about the explosions, but mostly I liked the whistlers, singers, and shriekers: the ones that screamed. Billy Acres and I bought a backpack-full from a fold-up table beneath the overpass. The old hippie had smuggled them up from South Carolina beneath a load of tie-dyed shirts. He said we had to buy [...]

With David Wu next to me on a barstool, my mind turns to froth. I know him from town. His family makes up the entire Asian population in Daphne, Alabama.

Out on my bike near my apartment I passed a group of boys standing at a crosswalk.

Fuck you, ching chong chang, one of them shouted.

A special Flash Friday edition of From The Vault, where we feature favorites from issues past. The story first appeared as a “New Voice” Tin House #28. We live in Tasiilaq, the eastern tip of Greenland, where two jutting coasts curve in on each other like crab claws. We are ruddy and plump and strong. [...]

She was pretty enough. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have noticed if she wasn’t. Or maybe I would have. Because if it wasn’t busy I just stared outside of the window. The kitchen window, I mean, which looked out on to the counter. Not a window that looked out on the outside. Those were too far away from the kitchen to see out of.

That they were not working class was listed as a problem for them, something they construed as a problem in order to reach the troubles-quota that families from that region were meant to meet.