The Ants Come Marching In

by Jessica Baker

“People don’t change from a lifetime to a lifetime. You either kill the ants before they ruin your leftovers, or you are fortunate enough to not have ants.”

Bones

by Chelsea L. Cobb

“Have a backbone. I’ve heard this said from my parents when I failed to defend myself. I didn’t understand because I was sure that I already had one.”

The List

by Jen Gardner

“Because we do not talk about our lists, but we all carry them, heavy with the shame we’ve misappropriated as our own. “

Girlfriend Girl

by Elizabeth Kirkhorn

“I had been reading the same sentence of Memoirs of a Geisha over and over, unable to move past it, obsessed with tugging my turtleneck collar away from my throat like it would give me some relief from the heat. “

The Ties that Bind

by David Meischen

“But from age fourteen on, I knew that my sexual transgressions, if discovered, would put me in danger. It was in the air I breathed. It was in the way men talked—their casual assumptions about manhood.”

You Survived Drinking from Garden Hoses

by Karen J. Weyant

“You once used garden hoses as your weapons but now you needed to be stronger and smarter and choose better arms.”