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I want to light your cigarette. You, the woman who shares her surname with a city romanticized by the likes of Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed. Berlin . Wunderbar.  I want to light your cigarette even though I've always been deeply allergic to something in cigarettes. Smoking never worked out for me, which knocked off a few cool points in the punk rock circles I ran in. Kids used to pop Vicodin. I popped Zyrtec. While on the subject of punk, let's note your fascination with the

Before I leave my house, I make sure my winter jacket is packed with the essentials: wet wipes, hand sanitizer, propolis throat spray, an N95 mask, disinfectant spray, and my "transit glove" that I use to open doors, press buttons, and move through the city. It's not craziness. It's flu season. I spray the elevator with disinfectant before entering—only when nobody is there, of course, I'm polite—and I don't share elevators, at least not by choice. When someone steps in while

All morning spent flat, still on the bedroom floor. The seam between the wooden planks is wide enough for a fingernail to clear grime and splinters. Noon chirps, then out to the mailbox. The truck picks its way down the road and rattles to a stop. The mailman stiff-arms a stack of envelopes out the window. Siobhan reaches forward. Carefully, she rehearsed this part for hours, peering at the ceiling.  The words come fast. It is difficult to remove Walter’s name from some accou

By the time I had learned that I was going to have a child, my cat had grown to an enormous size. When she stood on her hind legs, which was something she did now, she was the height and width of a dinghy. Her ears would brush against my ceiling and come away grey with dust. I had never realized that I needed to dust my ceiling, and now I had a way to do so. When I learned that I was going to have a child, my cat sat me down on the living room sofa. At first, she curled up in

In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general - Jonathan Lear My father died under the walnut trees, in a year when there were no walnuts.  The prior year, there were many: green globes tucked under their canopies of serrated, pinnate leaves. I collected them before they fell,

Ani King's " Deer Run " appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My favorite punctuation is actually no punctuation or wrong punctuation for the effect. I just love seeing what disregarding the rules can do to bring another layer to the narrative, how it can affect pacing, of course, but also what it does for the personality of the story, how it can be an element of characterization on its ow

Alfred Luarca's " Red Commas " appears in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Favorite punctuation: The semicolon. It’s a pause with backbone; part stop, part breath, part insistence. It refuses closure and holds two truths at once: this mattered; we continue. Hot take: Sometimes the push for “relatable” stories can make books feel the same. I’m more interested in fiction that surprises me and chang

Kristine Langley Mahler's " A Plate, a Name, a Pile of Dirt" can be found in the Winter 2026 issue of Br oad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? I’m an inveterate ALL CAPS user—that might not be official punctuation, but it’s my favorite by far, and is connected to my hot take, which is MORE ALL CAPS PLEASE!   What inspired you to write “A Plate, a Name, a Pile of Dirt”? I began this piece a handful of years ago as I was rearran

Zary Fekete's " The Things I Do Not Throw Away " can be found in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have?  My favorite punctuation are the ellipsis. I use them all the time for trailing, unfinished thoughts...or pauses :) My literary hot take: We learn early to crave stories that arrive with railings and exits, narratives that promise the dark will be brief and the meaning will announce itself on schedul

Yvette Naden's " Confessing to Mrs. Dalloway Through a Bathroom Door " appears in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Favorite Punctuation: Parentheses because when used, it's as if the text takes on a life of its own, as if the narrative is interrupting itself to reveal a sense of uncertainty or vulnerability. I like the idea that even the book knows it's holding something back and wants to correct

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