If you’d asked me before I had kids whether I would want kids with imagination or “normal” kids, I’d have said imaginative kids. Who wouldn’t?

1. Game of Phones, by Sprobile Verizatt

2. Don’t They Know It’s All Their Fault?: Cutting the Ballast from America’s Rise, by Malwasse Wright

3. What the Monkey Thought, by Pitter Patterson

I woke up in the water, well below the surface but still in the light. When I breached, I gasped and looked for safety. He was floating not too far from me, leg up on the back of the IKEA couch, his hand in a bag of chips, passed out. Even as I swam over to him, calling his name, he didn’t wake up; not until I almost tipped the thing climbing on.

I look behind her into the hut. Warm air flows out.

“I uh, saw the smoke.”

“Yes, it’s fine, I’m trying to cook some children.”

A black crow swoops onto the open window ledge, and yearning gushes from deep within me. I tamp down the emotion swifter than the crow can deliver its charge: a rolled parchment that bangs against the bookshelves as it flips toward the floor. The crow musses its feathers and launches into the air, off to retrieve its next assignment. Soon, someone else will receive fresh misery.