Deftly switching between past and present, the seven stories in Lisa Thornton’s We’ll Be Birds have as much to do with memory as anything. In “All God’s Creatures,” an older man loses track of the dinner conversation with his wife as he recalls an encounter with a desperate stranger the night before. In “Untethered,” a little girl longs for her absent father even as her mother curses his name. “Summer in the Midwest” is more experimental, everything existing all at once—Madonna on the television, an aunt’s funeral in the den, a stepmother sipping hot coffee in the kitchen with a teenage house party unfolding down the hall—as a tornado encircles the house. Lisa Thornton trusts her readers, giving them just enough to let their imaginations run wild. The stories here don’t come straight at you, but sideways, and beam right into your heart.

Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.

 Cover photo by Tony Chirinos. Tony is a Miami-based documentary artist, Guggenheim Fellow, and Professor of Photography at Miami Dade College. Driven by his family’s history of exile, his work explores identity and cultural memory.