Winner of Voyage’s 2021 Book-Pitch First Chapters Contest Chapter Thirty: Free? ⚘ Journal Entry 9: Prompt: What have you learned about yourself from being in anger management? Monday, May 9th, 6 AM My mama once said, these streets don’t hold our memories, we do. Just because something is gone doesn’t mean it ever left. Pieces […]

We sit and listen as your favorite album plays in the car. The singer has a thick, solid voice, backed by heavy drum beats and soaring guitar, punchy bass. You tell me that next time, I can choose. I want to hold your hand so badly. In the dark, nobody will see us. You don’t […]

Third Place Winner of Voyage’s Summer 2021 First Chapters Contest judged by Bestselling Author Sona Charaipotra . The spoon stopped at the tip of my mouth when he stormed in. He didn’t knock or nothing, just came in like he does and the look on his face meant something bad came down. Something bad always […]

Second Place Winner of Voyage’s Summer 2021 First Chapters Contest judged by Bestselling Author Sona Charaipotra Content Warning: Child death . “Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets. The moon sets. But they are not gone.” —Rumi . The dead are loud tonight. More than usual I should say, since loud […]

First Place Winner of Voyage’s Summer 2021 First Chapters Contest judged by Bestselling Author Sona Charaipotra Content warning: grief, drowning, death . prologue / a second like two lifetimes What I really want to do is practice toe loops with Tara, since we got our skates sharpened when we went downtown to the movies last […]

The goal is to make them believe I care. I probably should, but altruism has never been my strong suit. It’s not like I’m relieved that he died—I’m not a horrible person. I’m just… not very affected. I wouldn’t even say we had a real relationship. The past eight months have been us swinging together […]

It’s three minutes past seven on a rainy Monday night, and Keaton Montgomery can’t decide on the brand of apples to put in his cart. Growing up, he always thought there were three—red, green, and yellow. His mother used to buy the delicious golden yellows, never a week passing when the fruit basket on the […]

It would’ve been chrome if Juno waited ’til after this final exam to break up with me. I knew it was coming eventually—I don’t have my head completely in the airlock. But she’s got a real knack for timing. We’re in line for routine hormone checks, of all places—the whole class lined up to get […]

“I’m telling you—no one’s gonna die tonight,” the lunatic on the TV says. I’ve seen him before. He stands on the sidewalk outside the bakery on Tuesdays and waves tracts in people’s faces. “This catastrophe that everyone’s hysterical about, it’s just not going to happen. The very notion that there’s a cosmic entity—a God, if […]

After Lana comes home, she goes into the bathroom and shuts the door, leans her forehead against the cool wood, and notices how the shapes of the grain curve in and out of themselves— tiny lines that undulate in small tan and caramel waves. She pushes the small button in the middle of the knob […]

i. I wore black pants, a white button-down, and shiny black dress shoes that pinched my toes. My feet had grown like weeds over the summer, and I hadn’t broken in these new ones yet. They were still a bit squeaky as I paced around the other boys in the dressing room, watching Jamie, the […]

Fifteen hundred people was a lot more than Marv had realized. They milled about in the narrow aisles between the rows of tables, the heat from their bodies mixing with the muggy August air to turn the hotel lobby into a sweltering stew. Marv, sweat plastering his shirt to his back, was beginning to envy […]