When our narrator’s house is reclaimed by the wilderness, she embarks with her Pooch on a rambling and rollicking journey. She meets undead deer and living skeletons, travels through dream worlds and deserts of longing, and untangles truths from the messy web of life.
What’s it like when a complete unknown is actually close family? In Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship—a provocative anthology curated by B.K. Jackson, with a foreword by Libby Copeland, 28 acclaimed and emerging writers explore the transformative experience of encountering unknown close relatives. These are intimate stories by those who’ve spent years longing and searching for their unknown biological families and by others shocked to discover they have parents or siblings they never dreamed of—blindsiding revelations that demand both a radical recalibration of identity and a redefinition of family. Each addresses the myriad emotions that arise in the wake of these discoveries and encounters, demonstrating that what we don’t know can hurt us, that secrets are toxic, and that truth can bring healing, redemption, and, sometimes, estrangement. Woven through is a universal question: What does it mean to be family?
Steven has one year left of college when he returns to his small New Hampshire hometown for the summer. He says he is home to help his friend John, whose mother is dying, but he just might be escaping the uncertainty of his future. While he’s home, Steven finds himself drawn to the mysterious Catherine, an out-of-towner who drives around with a shovel in the back of her truck. Through alternating first-person POV and flashbacks, Steven’s present insecurities and Catherine’s heart-breaking past are revealed. The two must decide if they can trust each other – and themselves when a natural disaster is sparked nearby.
The hybrid flash memoir Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. When the elderly man faces his mortality, he finally names his father. The more the daughter learns about her father’s early life and origins, the more she understands him which leads to forgiveness for the past.
Virtuoso scream queens. Cuckholding cockroaches. Scorned mermaids. Orphaned trapeze artists. Young love. True love. Secret love. Consuming love. Sex, strippers, Stoli, and a severed human hand. Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them is a libidinous collection of 22 micros and flashes to light your fire and break your heart.
Keith J. Powell (he/him) is co-founder and managing editor of Your Impossible Voice. His writing has appeared in Best Microfiction 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, and elsewhere. Find more at keithjpowell.com.
If it were anyone else calling, Jamie would not have heard the phone ring. But it’s Micah, his ex-girlfriend, whom he hasn’t spoken to in six months, and things did not end well between them. She needs a ride home from Florida, almost ten hours away from their hometown. Jamie would like to hang up the phone, roll over, and pretend her call was a dream, but for some reason, one he is unable to identify, he can’t go back to sleep. That is the problem, and his way of solving it—perhaps the only way to confront his past and his feelings and who he has become—is to go after her. On a rollicking midnight ride from small-town Tennessee to Daytona Beach and back, Jamie turns over his relationship with Micah, with his friends, and even God, as he tries to do the right thing and save her. One last time.
In a basement lab, a technician and a corporate analyst operate a device that views other universes. Each attempt reveals the same beige room, down to the molecule—no sign of change other than a faint smell of cumin. With little else to measure beyond their own growing connection, they attempt to extract fiscal value from the possibility that nothing could ever have been different.