Fiction from Lauren O’Donoghue
Photo: Sunbeam Photography Formaldehyde The taxidermist’s wife was just that until the day her husband died. Now she is simply the taxidermist. People bring her their corpses, kills and companions both, and she resurrects them with borax and cotton wool. Her small, careful hands are suited for the work. Her incisions are clean and her […]
Nonfiction from shannon layne
Photo: LouAnn Clark If hope is the thing with feathers, and I am full of eggs, am I a bird? Forty antral follicles is too many. If you think, as I did, the more the merrier, you’d be wrong. Since each antral follicle contains an egg chock full of hormones, too many of them means […]
Fiction from Anthony Varallo
Photo: Krzysztof Hepner My Money-Making Scheme I don’t know what to say about how it all started, except to say that one day I was living paycheck to paycheck, counting every dime, and then the next day my wallet was bulged with tens and twenties. That’s the truth. I know I should say I’m sorry, […]
Fiction from Iona Rule
Photo: Stephanie Yaich Calculating Snakes with red and yellow stripes touching are venomous, those with red and black touching aren’t. If a man is wearing a shirt with blue stripes in his profile pictures, how dangerous is he? If you hear hoof beats do you think “Horses!” or “Zebras!”? How many times has it been zebras? How many […]
Fiction from Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Photo: Stephanie Harvey What if God Is One of Us I saw God in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, temporarily closed after a viral video involving hot sauce and a waiting to be filled burrito. He was dealing coke out of the back of a souped-up Honda Accord, baggies bouncing to the beat […]
Fiction from Mandira Pattnaik
Photo: Beth Macdonald Where Fate Keeps Her Tools We—banjo clocks, ivory mirrors, jadeite—love to be Fate’s tools. We hold up flags of bygone times in the fifty-year-old store named after George the Sixth, where the cobbled street bends away from Town Square. At George’s Secondhand Shop, all we do is—wait. When the wait’s over, we […]
Poetry from Hari B Parisi
Photo: Ashim D Silva Winter in Los Angeles A block from home I decide to change my name, press the walk button, cross over to the other side of the street, wish I had a friend to discuss whatever we might discuss, a dog tugging the leash. I flinch from the gunning of cars, swerve […]
Fiction from Brett Biebel
Photo: Amir Mohammad Holy War A kid from our town fell off the water tower and walked away. 150 feet and no hospital, no fractures, not a fucking scratch, and media were everywhere. Must’ve been a slow news week. Trucks from Fox and ABC News, and they’re interviewing all these Big Ten physicists who keep […]
Fiction from Allison Renner
Photo: PJ Gal-Szabo No Place Like Home Something in the way the crow carcass is splayed on the pavement brings to mind the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. I was seven when I first saw the movie at my grandmother’s house. I thought it was black and white because her TV was so […]
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