Fiction from Michael Sasso
Photo: Clark Young Charlotte’s Quantum Ride On a summer day in 1989, Charlotte bafflingly avoids certain death and slices through the solid block of Time. The six-year-old is given a narrow glimpse of things immutable and true, present and ever-existing: No matter how you fool yourself into looking to the alleged past or the so-called […]
Fiction from Kevin Brennan
Photo: Devin Avery Eulogy You had a way of changing on a dime. We’d wrestle you on the living room floor, cramping with laughter, till you roared a gnashing syllable and ended it, crawling up on knees red-in-the-face. You took us out on long drives and made us wait in the car for an hour […]
Fiction from Subhravanu Das
Photo: Peter F. Wolf In a Kitchen Ants came dribbling out of the tap. They licked the skillet clean. They cartwheeled over bubbles. They carouseled along the dinner plates. They took the steel glass out of Bulbul’s hands and tore it into tiny straws. They presented Bulbul with a ruby drinking horn as recompense. They […]
Fiction from Carolyn Fagan
Photo: Adrienne Merritt Graveyard Girls The five friends were buried together. The sixth one couldn’t make it. She needed to be buried with her husband, her children—her family, she said. The five had sensed this long before the planning and planned accordingly when it came time. By the time the sixth friend needed to be […]
Fiction from Shalya Powell
Photo: Matt Hardy The Other Shore Lulma has a sealskin and Kayla has a drowning dress. The garments are both, for a time, lost. That is, until today. Lulma is looking through Kayla’s closet for clothes to borrow, pulling woolen flannel after woolen flannel off cheap plastic hangers until she comes across the dress. There […]
Fiction from Mandira Pattnaik
Photo: Harald Matern When It Freezes, You Realize the Sugar Maple Tree Holds Its Snow In your crazy fairytale, your husband is an elf, your home a postcard, the time Christmas, with holiday roasts and popular jokes. The Sugar Maple tree, soaring to the azure, colonizing the void above your backyard, is heavy with milky […]
Fiction from Megan Driscoll
Photo: Andrew Seaman Modes of Reproduction Pacific Salmon are this funny thing called semelparous. It was a word Ellie taught me, years before she left. She’d sounded it out by the syllable: sem-el-par-ous. Sem like seminary, where she swore Brian Silver was bound to end up, el like Ellie, what she’d called herself since deciding […]
Fiction from Derek Fisher
Photo: Adrian N. Rash Purple sky in morning. Endless promise of warming. Purple sky at night. We all turn out the light. I decided to do a thing. Every hour on the hour I’d tell a stranger they’re beautiful. The decision came to me while writing poems in the Greenhouse Cafe. It hasn’t gone well […]
Fiction from Denise Tolan
Photo: Aleks Dorohovich Sell You, Sell Me The Commercial: The commercial ran in the early eighties, in the evenings when sitcoms came on. So many sitcoms came on. The shot began with a black screen, then quickly opened to a wide shot of fireworks over a lake; the concept seemingly a meta-firework itself. As if […]
Fiction from Jane Snyder
Photo: Adam Chang Little Red Schoolhouse My mother and father were in a good mood the day they put us on the train, full of fun. It was Saturday and they stayed upstairs for a long time. When they came down they sat on the couch with us, watching Underdog, said nothing about it being […]
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