Andreas was certain that when it first began, it wasn’t like this.“Andreas, please, a strategy,” Maggie said.“For a game of the lowest chance?”Everything Andreas and Maggie said carried the weight of all the other things they had said and the weight of all they knew about each other and all they knew about the others.“Numbers in…

The red light had lasted so long snow was starting to stick on the hood of David’s car and the aging defrost struggled to keep the windshield clear. He was mentally cursing a motorcyclist who was trying to skip ahead of the line of cars by zipping down the bike lane on the right shoulder.What an…

Pearl Dagnall doesn’t need somebody to love, and she’d tell you—if she ever talked to people offline—but interfacing is a problem for her. She has a limited tolerance for people in general, which is why she telecommutes. She has zero interestin romance with any of Facebook’s fabulous fifty-eight genders, and that’s the tip of the iceberg…

Blood pooled in the corner of the baby’s mouth.His mother sat with her eyes closed. He was warm and sleepy. He matched his breathing to hers.Tired, Sophie thought. The word rolled through her mind like a mantra. Tired. Tired. Tired. She felt it layer over her like the quills of a porcupine. She envisioned herself curled up on…

These days it’s hard to know whether the words coming out of Mom’s mouth are actually the same ones she’s got rumbling around in her head. Her doctor says the cancer cells have zipped around to every part of her body, crushing all the normal cells. Even her brain cells are mostly mush. Most of the…

That July there were five Becomings. I hated spending my small allowance on crappy gifts, and Mom complained about driving me around town. It was different when she was my age. Back then, she said, a Becoming was a discreet affair, marked in private with close family. I told her not to worry: she would never…

1 The somewhat bizarre account set forth in the following few pages—about a man, as it happens, with no special virtues, yet who in the aftermath of an ischemic stroke became (and perhaps verifiably so) the happiest man on earth—cannot properly be called a fable because it is mostly true. Nevertheless, it will not be…

From the pale-lit hallway, Jeff could hear his date bustling inside her apartment for half a minute before he knocked again and she opened the door. She was beautiful, small andslim, with dark hair and straight-across bangs, nicely modest- chested. Her brown eyes called out with long lashes against the deathly pallor of her ash-white face…

“Brothers and Sisters, Children of Lord God, Hear my words.”He liked killing with his hands. Jeramiah had a gun in his waistband, knife in his boot, and a choke-wire in his pocket. But when the time came for the Preacher-Man to meet his end, Jeramiah just wrapped his thick hands around that holy neck and…

Clarence Portis (1946-2013) was one of the greatest spellers ever to walk the halls of Exalted Wounds Catholic Elementary in north St. Louis. He was also one of the school’s first black students. Pale boys with razor knicks on the sides of their heads pushed him into lockers and called him things, while nuns looked away…

The last day of my parents’ marriage, my mother’s lover elbowed my father in the mouth. This lover had been my dad’s best friend growing up, the boy next door. He followed my parents to Indiana when the steel mill in our Downriver Detroit neighborhood closed. They let him sleep in the basement of our small…

Breath & Shadow is a quarterly journal of disability culture and literature. A project of AbilityMaine, Breath & Shadow is the only online literary journal with a focus on disability. It is also unique in being the sole cross-disability literature and culture magazine written and edited entirely by people with disabilities. While some literary journals may devote…