"There is one rule: when the car turns, stops, or starts again, no matter how gently, no matter how jackrabbit hard, you are to let your body fall as though you were a rag doll..." @jekwriter.bsky.social lets go of everything, melts into the carseat.

"...they ask me, at a dinner party (this only happens on the coasts because in Minnesota no one inquires about your personal life), and I say I work in a psychiatric hospital..." Rebecca Grossman-Kahn kills the vibe--& this essay on mental health

"on the phone with Grandma, we talk in circles—how are you, I'm good, how are you, I'm good—due to the shortage, the interruption in what was the extended chord of her mind..." Margaux Williamson explores the brain, short circuited.

"My mother’s hands are coated with darkroom fluid or melted carob, I can’t tell which, but one is caustic and one is healthy and she forces both on me..." @amygcb.bsky.social, on what–and who–color our world

"...echoes from the firecrackers we once set off under the grocery’s red awning, which ended badly (for the store, the seagulls in the parking lot, all our stupid vows)..." Thomas Mixon's story resides in the parentheticals (within the parentheticals)

"Since your mom is visiting after the funeral, please pick up while you’re out: Laundry Soap; Candles; One dozen eggs..." Matthew Merson's hermit crab essay shapeshifts from shopping list to intimate map of the mundane & the transcendent moments shared

"Baby writhes on the changing table, furious at this momentary loss of bodily control, until she catches sight of the bangles glimmering on my wrists..." @avashianeema.bsky.social, on the artifacts that tether us to our culture: past, present, future.

"Panic grips the birthday magician's face as the rope of scarves coming from his mouth shows no sign of stopping..." Andrew Cothren mines the terror inherent in the magic we conjure, all within a short story you can read in a single breath. www.completesentencelit.com/post/before-...

"She calls the same hospital that sometimes dials her in to interpret for tourists with pink eye or bronchitis or allergic reactions to the mustard in everything..." Katie Shireen Assef translates all the misshapen words suspended in our fear. www.completesentencelit.com/post/jour-de...

"...a bald eagle divebombed the blue, still-topped lake—but, instead of rising majestically from the splash with his catch, he bobbed and flapped the surface in a panicked distress of his own making..." Scott T. Hutchison wrestles a wild & violent symbol www.completesentencelit.com/post/america...

‘…somehow already on the verge of tears in that stupid, brightly-lit store…’ Wow! What a breathless sentence from @charnewbpoet.bsky.social in @completesentence.bsky.social, included in this year’s @wigleaf.bsky.social Top 50 🪚 www.completesentencelit.com/post/some-as...

So excited that Some Assembly Required made the @wigleaf.bsky.social top 50 this year! Thank you @samanito.bsky.social for picking her out of a crowded field of wonderful work, and @completesentence.bsky.social for being both her inspiration and home 💖 www.completesentencelit.com/post/some-as...

"...my grandmother tells me to imagine I'm staring at a dark hole, and so I do: one cavernous mass settled just inside the fleshy part of my throat that swallows Swedish..." Hannah Olsson grasps for the eel-slick words that swim just beyond reach. www.completesentencelit.com/post/farmville

"An eel-man follows me out of the sushi restaurant asking where I am delivering the oversized platter of unakyu rolls..." The holy trinity of betrayal, spite & shame bubble beneath slabs of unagi in @clinforth.bsky.social breathless & surreal breakup story. www.completesentencelit.com/post/eelfare

A new flash in Complete Sentence! www.completesentencelit.com/post/eelfare

Thanks so much to the beautiful folks @completesentence.bsky.social for publishing my little piece about my childhood nightmares and the joys of M*A*S*H. Would be very appreciative if y'all'd give a looksy.

"...every time I get up to click the TV off, my brother starts moan-talking in his sleep again and I’m afraid he really is turning into a zombie..." @thedrevlow.bsky.social conjures the fantastical terrors sown in the boredom of childhood. www.completesentencelit.com/post/m-a-s-h

"I will wake up and discover that my husband has died in his sleep beside me some time in the night..." Molly Gaudry's single-sentence, speculative essay imagines the destruction lurking, and the constellation of past traumas that steel us. www.completesentencelit.com/post/thirty-...

"...afterward, we dress unceremoniously and go back out for another smoke, where the sun has set and the mosquitos are rabid, where I scratch angry, bleeding welts into my legs... Brittney Uecker, on the ember of self-destruction glowing in our guts.

"...you drop your apple in the sand and she’s still gone, ants crawl out of the outlets and still, gone, you buy a veil, and something blue, and none of this makes her un-gone..." Natalie Warther unravels the myth of closure, of grief resolved.

"sometimes i wonder what was in the water in the town i grew up in, because most of us turned out real fucking weird..." @chickentenders.bsky.social mulls Mulaney, anxiety & the ominous shit strangers tell us, unearthing 'the body of who (he) once was.'

"...he tells me you weren’t the type to kill bugs before, and my fear has made me violent, a bad dog like the one I have in my chest, wet and shower-shiny..." Rabbitfeet, on the fear & shame that keeps us safe.

"...she held up just one finger and laughed (like the sound of a train brake screeching a whole town away) and I knew she’d already understood..." @charnewbpoet.bsky.social meets God at the hardware store.

"an old woman meets my pace as i’m walking along a road in Taiwan (a country where i was born but not where i was raised) and starts speaking to me..." - Jun Chou, on living in that liminal space between two cultures.

"I fucked up, okay, and I ate the whole jumbo-sized cinnamon roll, which was apparently not meant for me..." - @jdschwartzman.bsky.social, on how the stories we devour mutate, change shape inside our stomachs over time.

"The rabbits at the zoo aren’t exhibits, they’re just like us: free agents who’ve come to consume garbage and taunt a more majestic class of mammals with their liberties..." Stephanie Young considers the lagomorph & what is and isn't fair. www.completesentencelit.com/post/i-wear-...

"...Joe stayed even after she got pregnant by someone who wasn’t him, he stayed until he moved us, and not much is known after that so I’ll tell you about it..." Shannon Waite sketches a Jesus as unsettled as he is unsettling. CW: gun violence

"...he sliced off a translucent piece of flesh, so thin it could be a veil for a glittering sun seen from far underwater, or the cold petal of a tidal flower..." JR Fenn, on the homes we carry with us, within us.

"...I couldn’t locate the source of the sound which seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, an aural aurora borealis & it was low & moaning & inhuman..." Kristin Idaszak translates the frozen earth's groan for our Incomplete Sentence series. www.completesentencelit.com/post/winter-...

"...I won’t let someone make a mockery of human anatomy, its delicate or dim damp illusory curves and casts..." -Jace Brittain, on the facts and fantasy defining us improbable creatures. Part of our (in)Complete Sentence series. www.completesentencelit.com/post/curio-a...

"...I can’t forget the little one, like the splinter, that burrowed much deeper in the wrong place, and how I cried when they took her out of me, promising me relief would come..." -Rachel Holbrook, on what sticks with us. www.completesentencelit.com/post/things-...

"...he found the weed in the Jim’s Steakout parking lot in a gasoline rainbow and he makes me smell it... @justinkarcher.bsky.social on the highs that lie just beyond our sight lines. www.completesentencelit.com/post/how-do-...