Queen’s Journal Annual Short Fiction Contest, Second-place winner
She lets him kiss her if for no other reason than dulled, misplaced sensitivity. The carnal exchange is one of hurried passion and inequitable longing on his end, and drunken sympathy on hers. It’s half past two in the morning...
Queen’s Journal Annual Short Fiction Contest, Third-place winner
It’s taught to us as girls.
By the age of three, you know
the story.
Princess meets prince, they fall in love and live happily ever after.
(Radio voice) Ever after will be yours once you have the man — the strong man, the perfect...
You’re a mathematician and I’m the stubborn biologist who refuses to count the world to your series of algorithms. Sure, you take a tree and determine a fractal iteration and sure, I can map and define the physiology of your sinus cavity to the cellular structure.
But when it comes down to it, you...
Every morning when I wake up from a dream, I write whatever comes to mind as fast as possible. Mostly unintelligible, but occasionally worth reading.
Sometimes they are humorous.
The way you look at an almost-empty roll of toilet paper.
Sometimes I am afraid to read them…
I reached over to feel...
If I could talk to you I wouldn’t have to say anything, I’d just fall into you and swim as deep as I could, far away from the surface. I’d swim so deep that I would have only you to breathe. Inside you, I would hold on so tight that all of my ideas would leave me and I’d just be me, inside of you....
They cling to life, but just barely. Their miniature chests move up and down, a tube rhythmically filling their pre-mature lungs with oxygen. Wires send electrical pulses directly to their empty hearts to force the blood to circulate.
A warmer surrounds them, providing the temperature control they...
If you lived in a city indifferent to your existence, failure wasn’t suspect so much as an alternative lifestyle. Every morning, the couriers, clutching newspaper parcels, would pedal across the same neighborhoods and with delicate accuracy leave welcome mats filled with unwelcome news.
Occasionally,...
The bus jerked to a stop and I woke with a numb face. Somehow I’d managed to fall asleep with my cheek pressed against the window.
There was a smudge on the glass roughly the size and shape of my face. I had left my mark … without checking to see if I had everything, I grabbed my bag and rushed off...
By Sarah Robert
ArtSci ‘14
Neil was lying on his futon, covers kicked off to one side, socks dangling from his toes. It was a few hours past midnight. The window was wide open but the curtains lay flat and still. Bugs made noises at one another just beyond the screen, arguing. The air in the room...
The main character of this story stepped outside into the zero degree weather and pulled out a Belmont cigarette. His fingers trembled in the cold, causing them to tense up and squeeze the filter slightly harder than usual. The cigarette now bent to an oval as he touched it to his lips before setting...
Once, 1s and 0s unshackled themselves from the number line to wander some primordial plane of reality and it was there they noticed an inequality between them. According to the 1s, this was a divine inequality. It was an inarguable, unambiguous gift of value from the creator that the 0s had not received....