Home - Ploughshares

When you have a gun pointed at you, there’s an odd calm that washes over. Time slows and your movements become languid; all you can do is pay attention to the black eye of the barrel as it stares at you. You become oddly aware of your body: your heartbeat...

When an insect is taken over by a parasite, its mind succumbs to its new captor. No longer in control of itself, it defaults to whatever the parasite wants. Usually this means forgoing its own instincts for this other, freeloading thing. Memory is like...

How do you narrativize silence? Prose writers often neglect their silences, inserting them as off-beats during dialogue or as cast-off descriptors. But penning lines like “the room was silent” or “silence spread between us” hardly captures silence as...

In their debut short story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, out today, Lydia Conklin examines what it’s like to inhabit a body and/or sexuality that is inherently uncomfortable—not because of one’s certainty about their identity but because of how others...