Fiction: The Hopscotch Commandments
What to Bring to This Story:
— Sapphire earrings
— Your crab cake recipe
— A hopscotch charm
Nonfiction: Satin Wrap for Sale. Never Worn.
What to Bring to This Essay:
— The Bin of Clothes You’ll Never Wear Again
— A Hemingway 6-word story
— Your new old self
Fiction: Senescence
What to Bring to This Story:
— Love of fall
— Fear of irrelavancy
— French lentils
Fiction: The Resident’s Wife
What to Bring to This Story:
— A new, more capable self, even if you have to fake it.
— Bug spray.
— Google translate, so you can learn Albanian and then Bulgarian as you try to befriend the innocent-looking old man who keeps changing his nationality.
Fiction: The Dirty White Sky
What to Bring to This Story:
— Excitement for your first squirrel hunting trip and winter picnic.
— Your father, who will ask you to lie for the first time in your nine years of life.
— The ability to simultaneously look at the world backward and to see a backward world.
Interview: A Conversation with Shelley Berg
Interview with The Carolina Quarterly, which appeared on their website for the publication of “The Dirty White Sky.”
Fiction: Stage IIB: Anger
What to Bring to This Story:
— An addiction to holiday candy, especially Cadbury Eggs (even though you can afford better).
— 1.6-carat diamond engagement ring and the wedding dress that you never used.
— Your best friend, Mim, who you don’t deserve, to help you through the stages of breast cancer and grief.
Fiction: Reliable
What to Bring to This Story:
— Bus fare, because you can’t drive and the bus is where you see Juice Baby.
— A hat, because you get your hair done at the Beauty School and sometimes the girls are really new.
— Reliability, because your sister needs you even though she pretends she doesn’t.
Fiction: A Little Wisp of Soul
“A humorous tale told by a calloused, foul-mouthed, all-business soul who gets reassigned mistakenly to incarnate a ’copse’ instead of a ’corpse’ and the fruitless attempt to get the typo corrected.” –review from New Pages
What to Bring to This Story:
— Love of the human race.