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She Is a Battleground

May 20, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Nancy Au

Twelve-year-old butter boys face the old Chinese woman they call Baboochka. Imagine: the eighty-year-old woman on their apartment’s shared front stoop, the silver moon caught in her tousled hair, her yellow sweater vest, her milky-white Velcro E-Z Steppers. She jostles grocery bags from one hip to the other as she digs in her pockets for keys. She grumbles about the checker at the vegetable market pocketing her change, about her arthritic fingers too weak to open jars but too strong for the wet lettuce bag, about the bus driver that did not hear her call out for a stop. …

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Sleight of Hand

May 19, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Stephen Baily

[fiction] You’re walking home from Chester Park Elementary School, where you have the happiness of being in the sixth grade. As you’re passing the windowless flank of a multistory parking garage, a four-eyed classmate of yours named Dresner steps out of the doorway he’s been skulking in. —Check this out. The small volume he produces […]

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Disco

May 18, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Tim Fitts

[fiction] The Bank of Michigan gave my grandfather a banquet at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in the late seventies. While my parents watched television, I snuck out of the hotel room to explore. Almost immediately, I found myself locked out of the fire escape seven stories up. At seven years old, I pounded […]

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Switzerland

May 17, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Susan Goldstein

[creative nonfiction] Silly girls. We were two American college co-eds, surrounded by big, jovial mountain climbers from Norway. Or Sweden. We couldn’t understand them. The young bearded men were heavily into their schnapps and laughed as they tried, with hand gestures and broken English, to convince us to join them in a shot, or two. […]

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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Douglas Menagh https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Douglas Menagh2017-05-17 08:12:252017-12-07 08:43:43Switzerland

1964

May 16, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Claire T. Lawrence

[fiction] The first boy she ever kissed was actually two. Behind the heavy velvet curtains on the stage at the community center. It was summer; they were counselors who ignored their campers, who smoked the dried-up weed she had found in her brother’s dresser, smoked it behind the dumpster during lunch, crouching to avoid the […]

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Bitch-not-Witch

May 15, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Jay Merill

[fiction] I’m just appreciating what’s pleasing about Trent when it all goes wrong. He phones me, his voice less sweet and friendly than it was an hour ago. There’s a crackle of anxiety present now. “Den…” he says. After he’s spoken my name there is a sharp little silence. I break it with a sigh. […]

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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Korilynn Kessler https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Korilynn Kessler2017-05-15 18:23:222017-12-07 08:43:44Bitch-not-Witch

The Walt Longmire of IT Guys

May 14, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by John Meyers

[fiction] Kolarov started watching Longmire on Netflix last winter while engaging in half-hearted workouts on the bike trainer. The show has begun to own him. Kolarov is an IT guy, the dude you see in the office wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki pants, pushing a cart loaded with computers. That was before Longmire. […]

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The Blessed Bangle

May 13, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Rudy Ravindra

[fiction] A lady of leisure, Leela spent most of her time reading novels and literary magazines. She sat on the terrace, gazing at the white sailboats in the sapphire waters of Bay of Bengal, drying her long, lustrous hair in the bright sunshine, bantering with her sisters-in-law. Leela never went downstairs for breakfast until after […]

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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Douglas Menagh https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Douglas Menagh2017-05-13 15:34:452017-12-07 08:43:45The Blessed Bangle

Walmart Holiday Shopping

May 12, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Judith Roney

[creative nonfiction] List in hand: canned kitty food, hair color stuff, ribbon, Blue Plate’s Greek Lite Mayonnaise with Yogurt. Two names in the corner: Shaun / Elijah. The two names off to the right are the two you buy presents for each year. Only these two. It’s hot. Grab a cart. Pause to type a […]

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Screaming in the Heisenberg Wind

May 11, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by K.D. Rose

[fiction] He was dead-drop Zen with eyes of Sufi swirling; smoking, a catch for any NLP-savvy, Nietzsche-Kant gal, but if you looked a little closer you could see the dark, Goethic shadow hidden behind that tan, well-defined Qabalah. He was ad hoc but never half-cocked and everything he coined wore shades. She was a tall […]

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Scrap Art

May 10, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Deborah Thompson

[creative nonfiction] When a new recycling shop specializing in crafts items opens near me and requests donations, I decide it’s time: I gather up my years’ worth of hoarded Altoids tins, Mason jars, fancy gift boxes, barely crinkled tissue paper, and a jar full of the orange and magenta ribbons from the handles of boutique […]

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Blan-Manzhe with the Taste of Pear and Cream

May 9, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Olga Zilberbourg

[fiction] Her husband had said of the last bonbon, “These are not bad.” So, Victoria saved the green wrapper with the drawing of pears and a few weeks later, back at the Russian grocery, showed it to the cashier. “These were a part of last month’s assortment.” The cashier disappeared in the back. Victoria picked […]

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Issue Archive

  • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
  • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
  • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
  • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
  • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
  • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
  • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
  • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
  • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
  • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
  • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
  • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
  • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
  • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
  • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
  • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
  • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
  • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
  • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
  • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
  • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
  • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
  • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
  • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
  • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
  • Issue 1: Spring 2012

Genre Archive

  • Creative Nonfiction
  • Essays
  • Fiction
  • Flash Prose
  • Lunch Specials
  • Poetry
  • Interviews
  • Translation
  • Visual Art
  • Young Adult

Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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Mother-to-Mother: An Open Letter about White Privilege and Fragility

November 22, 2024/in Blog / Dr. Valerie Nyberg
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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Disappear Where? A Meditation on the Lost and Getting Lost

November 1, 2024/in Midnight Snack / Reid Delehanty
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/headshot-translator-Gabriella-Bedetti.jpg 400 400 translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes2025-05-16 11:00:362025-05-14 17:05:21we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

Fourberie

May 2, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Terese Coe
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Vernacular

April 18, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Mary Morris
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

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