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In Tokyo, there are no trash cans. At least, not in the way I once understood them. I moved here for work, and the first week I arrived, I searched for one the way a child might search for a familiar landmark in a strange city…something to tell me that the world was still operating by the same rules. But I found no bins. The sidewalks were immaculate, the subway gleamed, the surfaces looked freshly washed, and yet the small convenience store where I bought a rice ball had not

Here comes that buck again. Long flank, long shanks, big crown of antlers. Hooves cracking the ice-glazed early season snow in the yard, and on the other side of the grass there is a huddling confluence of doe, softly rendered into watercolor smudges of brown by frost on the window. Marcus from next door, also long bodied, long legged, hands that are twice the size of yours, asks hey, whatcha looking at?  You ask if he knows what a deer run is, how the stretch of land between

On the window ledge in my office, I keep a license plate hovering just out of direct eyesight. The license plate is near a container of holy dirt from Chimayó I’d collected on my last visit to the pilgrimage site in New Mexico, even though I still had enough dirt at home after I’d scrubbed it onto the back of my skull, trying to stop the inexplicable spasming on the back left quadrant of my head, spasms that sent me to the emergency room on my 39 th  birthday in a complete pa

The second floor is empty. The belly of the house thrums with guests, but on the second floor, the air is solid, untouched. Every door is locked. You walk towards the bathroom to the rhythm of a DJ no one remembers hiring. Kneel at the door. The sink is running. On the other side, you can hear the prayer of her breath. She says, “I ordered some flowers today. I hate online shopping, but that Mrs. Johnson’s place was closed.” “I never got any flowers.” “I didn’t say they were

If I wanted to find Yaya Clemen, I only had to follow the red. She marked the day the way fishermen track the tides, little commas of spit that browned at the edges on the concrete, on the wet market tiles, beside the bougainvillea, on the jeepney step where she would lift me by the armpits and plant me between sacks of rice and the lady with a basket of malunggay. Not blood, not really, though when I was small I swore it was, and the more they told me it was nganga, betel an

L.B . Browne is the winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Fiction. Her story, " The Dress Department " appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review What's your favorite punctuation? The em dash. Real thought isn’t linear and doesn’t arrive whole, and the em dash is honest enough to capture that. No other mark so boldly and elegantly barges in, interrupts language, changes direction midstream, and then steers a sentence back on track.   A literary hot take

Dorit d'Scarlett's story " Green Jumper " appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Brackets — though I rarely use them, I want to use them more. I love the way they create a secret chamber inside a sentence, a kind of afterthought or whisper that runs parallel to the main thought. Hot take: novels don’t need neat resolutions. Ambiguity is closer to how life is actually lived. A present moment,

Sofía Carbonell Realme's essay " Pearls in the Kitchen" appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What's your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have?   I love the em dash. It’s so— breathlessly—expressive, don’t you think? It also reminds me of Emily Dickinson.   Literary hot take: the 18 th  century is a skip.   What led you to submit “Pearls in the Kitchen” to a literary magazine versus a more academic one?   You know, I’ve never thought of thi

Margaret Dunn's story "Little Eden" appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Diehard fan of the em dash. "The Rules of Attraction" is Bret Easton Ellis’s best work, and it’s one of the best campus novels ever written. What led you to write “Little Eden”? I’ve always been interested in girlhood and ‘loss of innocence’ stories. Adolescence is the first time girls experience intimacy outside of th

Angela Townsend is the winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Nonfiction. Her story, " Write Until You Pray " appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review . What's your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? I will never outgrow the innocence of the exclamation point! It is life bubbling over, all earnest and unguarded. It keeps company with daisies and comets. It is the first kid in the cafeteria to admit to loving something uncool. It is a

An Essay on Substance & Style Onscreen, the table is set. A white saucer sits on a tablecloth printed with oysters and olive martinis. In the center of the frame, a brown egg waits in a silver cup. Manicured fingers appear. They wield a small spoon shaped like a seashell. It taps the egg once, then bites. A pearl jumps to the plate at the strike; another. The egg is full of them—large and small, glowingly pooled in the white curb of its belly. The spoon digs and scoops out a

Outside it was buggy. In a plastic bag I carried window cleaner, oranges, and waxy cold cuts. I’d already split one of the navels and thumbed out a slice, the pith thickening under my nails. I was walking home from the grocer’s, peeling an orange and trying to step on each crack. I glanced back at a crack where a tree root split the pavement and saw him then. Thin, dark-haired, rosacea up his arms and neck. He’d helped me reach a honeydew at the store. Now he was a house down

Winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Fiction Giulia has only to rehang this evening gown, a column of mint chiffon, before she can close the register for the night. But the woman in sunglasses is still here, flicking through beaded sheaths and A-lines Giulia should have waited to straighten. Perhaps Giulia should ask the customer what she asks every other woman who steps into her designer corner of La Rinascente. Mi scusi, do you need assistance?  A question that r

Winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Nonfiction I am not worried about praying, because I am not going to stop writing. I am not sensational at writing. I am terrible at praying. If I do not toddle through the Lord’s Prayer in my first wisp of the morning, I fail to have a proper conversation all day.  I am a magenta hypocrite. I bleed internally when the people I love forget to ask me about me. They spend twenty minutes of our short lives expounding on gutter helm

There was a week in late September when the house forgot it was mine. The light turned sidelong and suspicious, slipping through the blinds like it wasn’t sure it belonged. The hallway stayed cool no matter how high I turned the heating. Even the walls seemed to keep their distance, like they were waiting for someone else to enter the room first. I didn’t leave. Not because I was brave. Just because no one asked me to. On the third day, I lit a fire. She’d always hated the sm