BY LILY RABINOFF-GOLDMAN

ON THE FIFTH day of camp, once I’d memorized my bunkmates’ names and hometowns and written four letters home, our counselors, Lisa and Nancy, called a bunk meeting. We girls pulled beach towels from our cubbies and made a circle on the unpainted bunk floor. “We’re going to play a game,” Lisa said.

This was the summer I was eleven, the year my sister first got sick, and after begging my parents for months, I had been sent to sleep away camp for the first time. The camp was just east of the Berkshire Mountains, a Jewish oasis in central Massachusetts. Every morning we prayed before breakfast, and in the afternoons, after swimming in the lake and before going to electives in the art building or the radio hut, we broke up into groups according to our knowledge of Hebrew, and spent an hour playing vocabulary games with …MORE

BY PAULA TREICK DeBOARD

Veronica saw it just before it happened, saw it and knew. She leaned across the sink and slapped the window with a soapy hand, smack, smack and scream. Her cry alerted the sisters and sisters-in-law who had been scraping plates and wrapping up the leftover tamales, the sticky-faced children eluding rough swipes of the washcloth and the men who had gathered in the family room in front of fútbol. Maybe her scream, her soggy palm flat against the window alerted Jose as much as the double bump under the van’s tires, which had felt like nothing at all. Like running over a gardening hose, or – as he would tell Ernesto later, on their way home from the hospital – maybe a sleeping bag. Something small and insignificant left on the driveway, forgotten in the general rush of coming home from church, the women cooking the …MORE

BY RACHEL FUREY

In front of her sixth grade class, Riley acts out her own birth. Mother’s Day is this weekend and this is supposed to be a simple speech – something with pleasant platitudes about her mother’s kind acts. Things like baking cookies and making dresses and teaching her how to catch fireflies. But Riley isn’t a speech sort of a girl. She dreams of becoming an actress, preferably one like Sandra Bullock. She, too, wants to star in a movie called Miss Congeniality, wants to be transformed from her geekish self into a confident, beautiful girl capable of attracting men. She wants a scene like Sandra Bullock’s, one in which she gets to stand in front of an audience and demonstrate the SING (solar plexus, instep, nose, groin) pressure points on a merciless man standing on the stage beside her. She wants to hear him groan and watch …MORE

BY KRISTEN-PAIGE MADONIA

The week after I told my mother about my pregnancy, my best friend Emmy found out her dad was being sent to Iraq.  Like a lot of the dads in Morgantown, West Virginia, he enlisted as a reservist for drill pay, and that October, when their infantry unit was activated, over a hundred and fifty of our town’s men climbed onto an old beat up school bus and left for a place that, until then, existed for us only on televisions and in newspapers.  Now the war infected our families, and Emmy handled it like the rest of the reservist’s kids: with silent acceptance and a vacant shrug of the shoulders.  Like most important events that happen to you at the age of seventeen, her father’s absence felt like something she could not control.

And while Emmy’s home life became smaller and quieter, mine began to grow loud …MORE

BY MATTHEW SIMMONS

My dad is standing in front of a line of life-sized, clay copies of my dear, dead mother. They are in the garage, standing at something like parade rest, tipped back on their ankles, stiff bodies against the wall. I’m hidden outside the door, and he’s choosing which one he is going to use next.

The family car has been parked on the lawn ever since he turned the garage into his private mother workshop.

My mom, she’ll be back soon—until one of us manages to upset her. This means she will once again be walking around from room to room in our house, silent except for the thud of her heavy, flat-footed steps. And she’ll sit with us at dinner, even though she won’t eat. And she’ll be in the kitchen, staring out the window when I get off work. She’ll be sitting on the couch in the …MORE

BY JACOB M. APPEL

Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days off at the pharmacy, but Saturdays my wife is off too, so I do my flashing on Wednesday afternoons. In the mornings, I have my weekly rap session with Dr. Quince-Martin. She rents space on a corridor down by the waterfront—opposite a urologist named Littlecock—and, after a bad storm, the entire office suite smells of rotting fish. Dr. Quince-Martin makes a point of revealing nothing about her private life, but I’ve taken the liberty of looking her up on the Internet: Her husband is Dr. Martin-Quince, also a shrink, and she acted off-off-Broadway between college and medical school. Bit parts, mostly. Uncle Charley’s receptionist in Death of a Salesman . A servant girl in Hedda Gabler . I’m holding this knowledge in reserve. The reality is that I just see Dr. Quince-Martin to keep Dawn off my back. My wife …MORE

BY MEGAN HARLAN

The World’s Smallest Woman has her own stage. People pay two dollars to approach the elevated trailer, then peer over a chain-link fence into the impromptu living room where Thea spends every other summer week. Thea trades off with Charmaine, another World’s Smallest Woman who is, in fact, a half-inch shorter than Thea. Charmaine, originally from Quebec, speaks like Brigitte Bardot. The evening before she had called Thea and breathed into the phone, “I yam soo tiyerd. My booyfrehnd jest retehrnned from Montrreahl, end everr seence hee duss not leht me sleep.” Thea had agreed to cover for her with a curtness meant to deflect any more kittenish giggles. Charmaine, everyone at Coney Island who knows of such things agrees, is the fun Smallest Woman. Crazy, but fun. Like Thea’s daughter, Nikki, who sometimes works the Funnel Cake counter, but is usually on the boardwalk with her friends.

On …MORE

BY SEAN ADEN LOVELACE

One time a snake fell into my canoe. Right out of a bush. This was on the Spring River, in central Arkansas. I believe the snake was an Eastern Kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula getula), or possibly a Queen Snake (Regina septemvittata), though I’m no professional herpetologist. Well, my fellow canoeist—also my little cousin—leapt right overboard. Talk about impulsive! Reflexively, I grabbed my paddle and struck the snake with a delirious vengeance, severing its head. My mother and father and aunt and uncle paddled up and asked why my cousin was in the water. I lifted the headless snake. My mother screamed. My uncle gasped. Overhead, crows crowed.

Later, over a tray of cold spaghetti, I found myself the topic of conversation. A young man told me, “Speak louder.” After taking the pressure of my blood, a nurse passed me an appointment card, a vividly beige pill, and this sage …MORE

BY MARIE POTOCZNY

There are mice in the library, and the teenagers are having sex in the reference collection.  The junior high boys are expressing their constitutional rights to look at pornography, and the girls are shredding the magnetic strips out of back issues of Vogue and People to steal for their bedroom walls.

The FBI man lurks in the corner waiting to see who will read To Kill a Mockingbird so he can arrest them; he is also sometimes the library’s public masturbator.  He puts a paper bag over his head when he unzips his pants but everyone knows who he is by his shoes.

The soccer moms are in the toilet snorting coke.  Their cell phones ring, and ring, and ring.  The senior citizens have been let loose from the old folks’ prison, and they shuffle around in the reference collection trying to get the teenagers having sex to listen to …MORE

BY SUSANNAH BRESLIN

She had a thing for insects. She had a lot of things for a lot of things, but what she really had a thing for was bugs. Men, in her life, had come and gone, but the insects stayed with her. She had wandered through her backyard as a young girl, collecting ladybugs, and fireflies, and crickets in glass jars. Late at night in her room, she watched while they glowed, and fought, and died. When she grew up, insects would appear to her at the strangest times. As she slept, they would arrive in droves, buzzing around her sleeping head. When she was lost on a road, a swarm would descend upon her, obliterating the world around her. While she was having sex, they flew out from within her, bees from her mouth, wasps from …MORE