FICTION

Jane Avrich THE LIFE OF CARDS
“The Two of Spades is not a baby. He is fat and horny. He has new shoes. He’s been taking piccolo lessons and he is just about ready to make his move.”

YOUR HOROSCOPE BY BLAKELY AND JORG
Taurus—Get a tape recorder and repeat after me: The snap pea habit has got to stop.

Aimee Bender LEMONADE
They were like a sculpture: Bitch plus My Friend plus Her Boyfriend on Mall Bench.

Kate Bernheimer WHITEWORK
This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods. And I had no use of my legs.

Judy Budnitz ABROAD
We drank bottles and bottles of wine, and I was fascinated by the way she ate, pulling things apart with her fingers and sucking out their insides. My throat closed up at the soup, which I swear was full of things still alive and swimming.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum THE YOUNG WIFE’S TALE
Where am I? she wondered, and at the very moment the question arose, she felt beneath her palms the cool, papery surface of a birch. She was lost in a stand of ravishingly white, naked trees.

Mary Caponegro THE REWARDS OF A HUMBLE PROFESSION
Once I was practicing my juggling act and the balls turned before my eyes into women— three rather diminutive women curled into fetal position but otherwise exquisitely formed.

Lucy Corin MICE
Finally what it comes down to is that grossness overwhelms the overall adorableness of mice. I try to resist, but in the end I just won’t let them take over my stuff.

Rikki Ducornet THE DICKMARE
She is lovely, vitreous and permeable, her bottom globular. Aroused, she is luminous in the dark. No one, she muses, has noticed these things for a very long time.

Julia Elliott THE WILDS
A bubble of musky ammoniac air enveloped their home like a force field, and the second you dared step through it you felt dizzy; a hundred arrows whistled around your ears.

Samantha Hunt BEAST
If I tell him, though, maybe he could build a special door for me. He’s handy like that. A door that doesn’t require opposable thumbs.

Shelley Jackson WORD PROBLEM
He was carrying someone’s death. It was not heavy, since it was mostly air, but it was big, and an awkward shape.

Miranda July ORANGES
“Are you anyone’s favorite person?” “Oh.” “I can give you more time to think about it.” “No, no, that’s okay.” “Some very prominent people are not anyone’s favorite, it doesn’t necessarily mean—” “I am.”

Kelly Link LIGHT (complete story)
A long, lubricated conversation followed about over-the-counter shadows. Everyone was in agreement that it was almost impossible to distinguish a prosthetic shadow from a real one.

Stacey Levine THE GIRL
Her hair was short and gathered to points, like whitish brown fur. The girl stood in the hallway near the man who currently owned her, who kept her on a parents’ leash.

Miranda F. Mellis THE COFFEE JOCKEY
She flounced all the way to the piers where two guys had killed a swan. She saw the swan brought back to life: a vampire swan. They were filming a post-reality show. The vampire swan was played by Harrison Ford.

Lydia Millet THOMAS EDISON AND VASIL GOLAKOV
Curiously, as the translation illustrates, the beginnings of the rift between master and domestic can be traced to an elephant execution on Coney Island.

Alissa Nutting HOT, FAST, AND SAD
I am the only woman in the kettle, which strikes me as odd. I’m voluptuous and curvy; I can quite understand why someone would want to gobble me up. The men do not look so delicious.

Stacey Richter THE DOLL AWAKENS
On the first day Miss Pretty was out of the box, the two continued with what they kept referring to as “a little chemistry action” for several hours.

Julia Slavin DRIVE-THROUGH HOUSE
Miss Cutler’s ’52 DeSoto still smelled like Holsteins on a clover diet at dusk. I walked alongside the car as she inched through the front hall and parlor.

Gina Zucker A HARD WORKER
In the office light she gleamed pink and gold all over, even orange in some places, such as her ears and nipples; her skin seemed lit from inside and I wondered if this was a trick the Janssen brothers were playing.

POETRY

Rae Armantrout
GUESS (complete poem)
HEAVEN
RELATIONS

Willa Carroll
IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM

Thalia Field
PARTING (FOR CRYSTAL)

Tedi López Mills
NIGHT (QUERULOUS)
NIGHT (TRICKSTER SEA)

Lucia Perillo
TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND VOLTS PER INCH

Paisley Rekdal
EDWARD CURTIS’S “AT THE OLD WELL OF ACOMA”
EDWARD CURTIS’S “A YOUNG NEZ PERCE”

Mónica de la Torre
$6.82

NEW VOICE—POETRY

Anne-E. Wood
GHOST WALK

ESSAYS & FEATURES

Rick Moody THE ANGELA CARTER WORKSHOP,
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
A former student looks back on his class with one of literature’s great fabulists..

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