In what remained of the marketplace in the small town of Torata, Peru, the Red Cross rescue workers gathered for briefing. Among the rubble left by the earthquake were watermelons with smashed skulls and yelps of color ...
Torata by Zoe Marie Bel
Fiction, LAR Online
Final Judge: Carlos Allende
These Poor Mothers by Vera Chan
They look like my daughter. Sixteen or seventeen, blonde hair that touches their shoul ders, pale faces. The newspaper runs their photographs in black ...
Los Angeles Review 2023 Short Fiction Award: Vera Chan
Award Winners, Fiction, LAR Online
I knew it was going to be a bad day when Eliana called. I was playing hooky, walking through a white-walled art gallery, beneath a helix of tiny red, blue, and green sports cars suspended by hundreds of thin wires. ...
Say a Prayer for the Pretender by Alli Cruz
Fiction, LAR Online
Jane wears jeans with deep pockets for water bags. She was underweight at the last blood bank. At this one, filling out the form, she pauses over the blank for occupation. Blood donor seems suspicious. She tries to ...
Trapeze Artist by David Serafino
Fiction, LAR Online
The thing was, we’d always be all right, as long as we had each other. And we had plenty of that. We had being young. We had being married. We had it all on 50 gorgeous acres of our own estate vineyard, which, as ...
A Simple Murmur from a Dream by Angela Ma
Fiction, LAR Online
It’s not until they reached the dessert course that Carl told Gioia that he was the son of Satan.
Of course. Carl hadn’t acted particularly Satan-y—she’d dated worse—but that was her luck lately. Her mother ...
Bad Habits by Melissa Darcey Hall
Fiction, LAR Online
It’s a field trip day, and there they are, a hundred or so of them. Maybe fourth grade, maybe fifth, sixth. They heave with unrestrained laughter, silent from this side of the glass. They swat each other’s groins. A ...
The End of Track by Nicholas Maistros
Fiction, LAR Online
Today, when the doctors come into the exam room, they find me a leper.
Symptom #1: I have a rash running down the inside of my right leg. “It looks like pizza,” I say. “And it hurts.” I describe the ...
The Standardized Patient by Joanna Petrone
Fiction, LAR Online
When Maro woke up the morning of that summer day, he was supposed to hurry out of bed, take a quick shower and leave for his vacation with his boyfriend of two months. They were planning to spend a week in Dahab, a ...
Maro by Essayed Taha
Fiction, LAR Online
