Fiction
-
New! LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: April Edition
Happy poetry month everyone!
Here at LIT we are starting a new series of monthly writing prompts. This month’s prompt is from our nonfiction editor Vicky Oliver:
Write about a time when you were lost and how you found your way home.
The hero’s journey is sometimes a parable on the transformation of being: old habits and emotional reactions that are shed out of necessity as they become stumbling blocks to the journey. The old ways are replaced by new strengths or new ideas that have been germinating out of sight, waiting to come into play as fresh discoveries in a moment of crisis,
-
Watch and Wait
image curtesy of Public Domain Review
by Lucy McBee
My name is Elizabeth Holmes.
But I’m not the one you’re thinking of.
I’m not a Stanford dropout.
I’ve never been on the cover of Fortune.
A former Secretary of State has never sided with me over his own grandson.
I can’t speak Mandarin.
I’ve only worn blood red lipstick once, to a Halloween party. I went as Elvira (and was mistaken for Morticia Addams, I suppose because I lacked the requisite cleavage),
-
Traveling With a Door
image Lorenz Stoer (1567), from The Public Domain Review
by Sandra Hunter
The girl watches the woman—green beret, yellow balloon pants, blue shoe, white shoe, ripped red scarf around one wrist—an eight-foot slab of wood across her back, bending her into prayer. The woman prays and curses across the road in front of cars stunned into stillness. When she reaches the curb, she unloads against a telephone pole the slab, nestling wood to wood. She breathes heavily, head down, drags her scarfed wrist across her face and neck, looks up to the sky, stretches her arms wide,
-
Horde’s Oeuvre
image detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - Public Domain Review
by Ian Power-Luetscher
A fucking gryphon got our mayor last night and now everybody in Pod24 is just losing their shit.
I hear the news on the community feed, during the “rise and shine” talk block. We’re in the kitchen and I’m pouring juice for Lydia when someone yells, “Kenny Staples got picked off by a gryphon outside of the bank. You can see it on securityCam8.” And then the feed goes bonkers, and I knock over the OJ carton.
-
Cousins
diagram by Thure Brandt (1895), Public Domain Review
by Claire Donato
A woman and her ex-partner were together for ten years but never married, despite their shared affinity for The New York Times Vows column, which appears on Sundays in the newspaper’s Style section. Every weekend, they would read Vows aloud to one another— idyllic short stories of couples meeting, falling in love, getting engaged, and marrying, presented sans red flags or conflict. Any real interpersonal turbulence was smoothed over to the pitch of a PG-rated romantic comedy movie. They cut out their favorites and neatly
