"...separated from her group, she ended up in a second-story bedroom filled with ceramic pigs and origami pigs and pig dolls with round pink pig faces and pigtails for hair..." Brendan Todt, on the creatures that unsettle us most. www.completesentencelit.com/post/the-bas...

"There should be a word for when you’re walking through your parents’ subdivision at dusk and the sky is lavender and peach and sweat is dripping down your neck..." Maria Hardin explores how the quiet unrest in our gut colors the world we witness.

"...we worked solitary tasks at a distance from one another...ragged breezes sweeping by, cooling our sweat like ghosts passing through us..." Robert Erle Barham's haunting sentence searches for comfort in the familiar phantoms that follow us.

"...or perhaps it was hearing Mariah Carrey’s “All I want for Christmas is You” from November through February, over and over and over and over, on the jukebox..." Sophie Amado, on the grind of tending bar, passed down through generations.

"..he told me he’d endured 14 ex-boyfriends, two of whom had died of drug overdoses, he said 'I really know how to pick them,' which I think was the boy’s only effective joke.." Edmario Lesi on misconnections & pissing on the frozen lake beneath our feet www.completesentencelit.com/post/what-ki...

"...I’ve pretend-twisted the key over my lips and activated the pulley, jerking the ladle that rolls a golf ball down the plank and into the hole igniting the flame that burns the photo of us..." @kiklodge.bsky.social on breaking up, Rube Goldberg-style

"You ask me what you are worth...it is easy enough to calculate...your body, deconstructed, contains approximately $129 worth of oxygen, $384 of carbon, $7.20 of Nitrogen..." Andi Myles crunches the numbers on what we are and are not worth to each other.

"...nineteen, disowned for my exposed desires and all alone, soothed myself to sleep with think of the money, the money, the money... So much story lurks in negative space in Candace Walsh's deep dive into the mind of a surrogate.

"..I didn’t know yet that in my twenties, I would become dry everywhere—dry knuckles in the winter: peeling, bleeding, cutting, blood dripping onto my laptop..." @rubyprosenthal.bsky.social on the skin we shed, scratch free from & the new bodies we reveal www.completesentencelit.com/post/dry-mai...

I'm in Complete Sentence Lit today! Have been a fan of this journal since I was in college and am quite grateful to be in it. www.completesentencelit.com/post/dry-mai...

"I had a vision of Jesus once— yes, a vision of Jesus and my deceased grandfather and also my deceased twin..." @isabelh8.bsky.social, on the meaning we unearth from the images that crystalize in us, and how their resonance shifts in timbre with time

"Six muscled litter carriers deposit my sister’s soul-slipping body in her Happy Place of soft bedding, motivational quotes, and perfectly picked wall colors..." -MaxieJane Frazier, on the surreality of death and the elephantine weight of grief. www.completesentencelit.com/post/elephan...

"In hindsight, my hat looked nothing like a fedora, and the mustache my best friend Charley taped to his lip looked nothing like Hitler's..." @timothycgoodwin.bsky.social conjures a child-world that expands within a sentence, collapsing just as quick www.completesentencelit.com/post/indiana...

New piece out today with @completesentence.bsky.social! I’m so happy to be in one of my fave lit mags. And—bonus!—my dad painted the artwork! www.completesentencelit.com/post/indiana...

"...Kyle and Annie both understand that the heart is a spider web capable of trapping and feasting on small, beautiful joys..." It's tricky shifting close 3rd Person POV mid-story, damn near impossible mid-sentence. Yet, @andrew-maynard.bsky.social nails it. www.completesentencelit.com/post/carbs

Set out to create the most literary one-sentence story ever written about the intersection of hand jobs and the Olive Garden. Thank you @completesentence.bsky.social for giving this piece a home. And my nephew for making the art. www.completesentencelit.com/post/carbs

"...that doesn’t stop me from being a heroine on the brink of madness, it doesn’t stop me from knowing that ghosts, guilt, and grief are so often the same thing..." Who is the terrorizer and whom the terrorized in Jade Braden's spooky 1-sentence essay? www.completesentencelit.com/post/my-own-...

"...Sharon had mastered the art of functional dissociation, a skill she employed during dinner dates, but also job interviews, missionary sex, and instructor-led exercise..." Anyu Ching's tightly coiled story unfurls, a slap bracelet before snapping back www.completesentencelit.com/post/exposur...

"...in search of the untranslatable, in an airless chase or a desperate dying expression, some lucky few find themselves translated, unable to return to that object they were previously..." -William Zheng-Kang Hassett, on how words define, translate us

Got a new one-sentence story that has first given seed in a hospital waiting room, then progressed in the SmokeLong Fitness (@smokelong.bsky.social), and found its final shape on Complete Sentence (@completesentence.bsky.social) today. Hope you enjoy.

"When I was in high school and I’d fall into another deep depression, my father would knock on my bedroom door, stepping into my bog..." Madison Trowbridge reaches from ancient muck, lingering on the tender ways parents struggle to rescue kids from the rot

"...it’s when, in an hour or so, I’ll watch a collision 6 million miles away from earth over a bowl of leftover pasta..." Jacob Ginsberg meditates on those lingering hollow moments

"...a serpentining of copper-colored and swiftly-flowing water clotted with sticks and dead leaves, and the carcass of one swollen-bellied beaver, a boy steps into the ankle-high water..." DS Levy's tightly coiled story strikes at the last moment

"...I care about you, fossil fish, so much that only I can be the one to smash the mallet down on the base of your skull and flip you over and slice you open..." There's a tender brutality in @amberwn.bsky.social 's 1-sentence story on sturgeon.

"...my daughter’s got my number, and the way she looks at me sometimes fills me with shame because I wear my love like a costume and at night I crawl out of it and into bed, exhausted by the play I’m in called motherhood.." [email protected]

"After my last round of chemo, I at last showed myself the courtesy of being my true self, of shirking my duties as a member of the society, of not being polite..." @sarpsozdinler.bsky.social's fiction maps a body on fire that has stopped apologizing www.completesentencelit.com/post/deathse...

I've got a new one-sentence micro about electrocuting oysters up at @completesentence.bsky.social and if you like when I write stories about electrocuting things, stay tuned 🤫 www.completesentencelit.com/post/edison-...

Dream. Come. TRUE. Acceptance from @completesentence.bsky.social!

"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.