Fiction
The Widow
By Annell LópezIn Annell López's short story, “The Widow,” a woman grieving the loss of her husband meets a man through a dating app designed specifically for bereaved spouses. Instead of "swapping Joan Didion’s book about grief like a safety blanket," she eventually decides to follow a stranger into the woods--a hunter who promises her that taking a life will be the remedy that reconnects her to her own. Though grief is universal, an experience we all will ultimately one day share, “The Widow,” with its many twists and turns, reminds us that each person’s journey to the other side of it is unpredictable.
The Love of Joey’s Life
By Zack GrahamZack Graham brings us an original story of high-Gogolian strangeness played out on the streets of Chicago. Teenage Joey's turbulent plungings might easily be dismissed as noxious angst, but Graham excels in capturing the awkwardness and vulnerability of adolescence. The perspective—distant as we are distant from ourselves in dreams, while simultaneously immersed in the illusion of sensory experience—invites questions of how much, if at all, we should sympathize with the person before us.
