Mud Season ReviewDiorama And so it was, from the day he left us. I didn’t want to, but I ended up counting days, as if the numbers might add up to something more than gone, like some kind of miraculous equation resulting in next month’s rent. It wasn’t so easy, even when Jack was here and employed; […]
Artwork by Claire Lawrence
Deadheading Freddie Fortune would’ve been fourteen the day my brother and his friends burned down the Dairy Delight. Sam poured the turpentine and Noah dropped the match, but Mr. Martin started the fire the afternoon he smiled too long at Freddie over the ice cream counter. “A sweet treat for a sweet boy,” he’d said, […]
Gone from the World by Talbot Hook Finally. He had forgotten just how many times he’d put his name in, but now — relief. Freedom. He had finally done it. He immediately turned off the screen, and went to the fridge for a beer, pausing for a moment, the afterglow from the television blaring happily […]
to my love, a portrait by Nicholas LaMendola “Aema is fourteen. Maybe that means something to you. Maybe that’s all I have to say by way of introduction, maybe that’s enough for you to see her as she is. In my defense, I tried to go further than that, I tried to delve deeper into […]
Revelations
By Blake Johnson
Curtain Call
By Bari Lynn Hein
On Friday afternoon, Simone saw the first sign that things were getting back to normal. Liesl and Ryan argued most of the way home from school about something absurd. Which one of them had been the first to do something or to say something or… Who cared?
Read more
Alfred’s Feast
By Chuck Radke
Eventually, Alfred said, they all stopped coming, even the son, who was nearing seventy himself and had the dull wife with asthma. At the other end of the building, in the library, preparations were underway. The ladies from the Purple Hat Guild always did such a nice job…
Read more
Return or Exchange
By Iris Litt
I finally got to the desk of the Bureau of Husbandry in the huge Riverside Mall after waiting in line for over half an hour. The figure behind the counter had a completely blank face, as blank as the faces of the robots who personned some of the other stations…
Read more
Judas Sheep
By Bill Bruce
Like most everything else, they arrive by boat. It’s morning. The plank lowers. They trot naively onto the dock. Fear and uncertainty are met by the presence of a single, stoic figure in black. He reassuringly calls them to attention. The discordant chorus quiets…
Read more
Coming Home
By Prisha Mehta
There is a room painted yellow and a crib painted white and a child in the crib with a sputter of freckles that will fade and mellow as she grows. There is the scent of baby powder, the rock of distant voices. Her eyes are closed…
Read more
Watchtower
By Shane Inman
Right after it happened, I assumed I’d always remember the look on Ethan’s face the moment just before the ice swallowed him. But a decade was a long time and cast shadows on old memories…
Read more
Portrait of a Marriage as a Young Thing
By Kathryn Ordiway
When it’s trying, Liv reminds herself that everyone says the first year is the hardest. This helps. She imagines the three hundred and sixty-sixth day of their marriage as a rosy winter day, fresh snow on the ground…
Read more
Girl Country
By Jacqueline Vogtman
The farmer was driving a deserted county road in the early darkness of fall when he found the girl. He was on the way home from burying his wife. His brother sat in the passenger seat, and it was he who spotted the girl first: a shape moving on the side of the road…
Read more
This is How You Get Off Food Stamps
By Claire Robbins
1. First you will need to get on them. This is easy: move out of your mother’s house, live in a patched green army tent on the wrong side of town. Get pregnant. Forget who the father of your unborn child was but remember the shape of his nose…
Read more
What Does a Nine Year-Old Know?
By Carley Gomez
“I’m a lesbian,” Tim’s nine-year-old daughter Sammy told him. She had a ponytail and a loose tooth that she flicked over her lip with her tongue as they stood in the aquarium in front of a tank of seahorses…
Read more
Pool
By Stanley Delgado
Mom told Wendel it was like swimming in saliva, it was so warm; he would love it—absolutely love the pool. She knew he was on summer vacation, so he couldn’t say no…
Read more
Last Sympathy
By Nathan Alling Long
SANUS DREAMT a bomb exploded just outside his apartment building. He heard the detonation, then saw the window shatter, the ceiling crumble, and debris scatter across the floor. He lay there naked, feeling the dust settled on his skin…
Read more
Vernix
By Joe Baumann
The neonatal nurses couldn’t remove the vernix from Evan’s skin. They tried hot water, scrubbing with their hands through the squeaky latex of their gloves; they soaked washcloths, scratching them against his pink baby body, at first with a delicacy reserved for afternoon tea…
Read more
How It Ends
By Rosanna Staffa
Stiff chairs, pens scratching. We sat at a large table, budding playwrights in summer clothes and fresh haircuts. The mentor looked tiny and mysterious, with beautiful black hair and delicate skin. I was afraid of her. She was terribly smart and famous…..
Read more
Next of Kin
By Sarah Freligh
Richard Nixon is dying. The radio in Sophie’s car burps to life with this news, then mysteriously quits. A short in the electrical system, according to her brother Kevin, something tricky and too expensive to bother with in a car this old….
Read more
Honey Bee
By Casey Lefante
You lift your scalpel, stare at the speck in front of you. You feel kind of bad for it. One minute, it’s living its life in a sweet little colony, making honey and shit, and the next minute, it’s dropped unceremoniously onto a tin plate for a fifteen-year-old to dissect…
Read more
Here, There Be Dragons
By Jillian Merrifield
Dana and I are on this party’s shitlist, I can tell, and I’m pretty sure that it’s mostly about me. The host is the building manager of the high rise that Dana works in downtown, and he was so pissed to see that she’d brought an unsolicited male plus-one…
Read more
Laura
By Florence Sunnen
I wake up to the phone ringing, and the sun wedges itself between my lids. I peel my cheek off the notebook page I fell asleep on. The ringing comes from underneath a pile of clothes. The light is deep; it is the afternoon. I dig around for the phone and answer…
Read more
The Lady of the House
By Constance Renfrow
The noises upstairs woke Marla again. Her phone would read, she knew, 2:08 a.m.—the same as it had every night for a week. She pressed her face deeper into the bed sheet—the pocket of air beneath the covers warm and unmoving, safe…
Read more
The First Task of Letting Go
By Christine Linn
I. Corporeality of action. The first task of letting go: righting bodies. If I found you, I would lift your one hundred and forty-two pounds of gangle easily. I would lift those one hundred and forty-two pounds of boy-smell t-shirts…
Read more
