Fiction from Christine Offutt
A Hand on My Shoulder I am the girl with a hand on my shoulder. I don’t mean like a leg on a foot, which is just another way of saying “a foot at the end of a leg”. I don’t mean the hand of comfort, or an ally, I mean a hand, literally, a […]
Fiction from Benjamin Niespodziany
Photo: Luke Southern Guadalajara Funeral Parlor I am in an apartment in Guadalajara across from a 24 hour funeral parlor that never stops partying. In this dream, children grip pistols that shoot black flags. Pristine limousines breathe tattered tassels. The bereaved own the district. They stuff trumpets in each hearse and blurt dirges through the […]
Fiction from Cathy Mellett
Photo: Honey Caranzo The Green Bridge My mother Marnie was visiting us again. She said she left her husband for good this time. It was always for good, and she always went back to him. But for now, she was living with my grandmother and me. The first day Marnie was home, she phoned a […]
Fiction from Nathan Willis
Photo: Zane Lee Wholesale Ghost Hearts The ghost hearts fill my body like Styrofoam nuggets. I can only take them out one at a time and only at certain places. So far, those places include the roof of the high school that Karen went to, the house grandma lived in before the home, the church […]
Fiction from James Braun
Photo: Daan Stevens Wither The other boy, the boy before Jonathan, was a child of twelve years who came into Mercy with a nail in his head. He had had to get it surgically removed––the nail, not his head––and left with only a few stitches covered by a Band-Aid. Before him was a girl who […]
Fiction from Jennifer F.
Photo: Daniele Levis Pelusi The Lipomatous Lover The first time Pat stripped Jack she gagged, but she was too far gone to go back. The second time Pat stripped Jack she did not shut her eyes against the lumps that clustered on his body like the eggs of a large, fecund amphibian. There were dozens […]
Fiction from Lynn Mundell
Photo: Ellise Verheyen Octavio The grey cat smells of smoke. Is smoke, in the way he materializes one day after a window is left open. Half-starved, he slinks under armchairs, sofa, hutch. Do you own a cat, her newest lover asks, sneezing four times quickly. No, she says, truthfully, raking the man’s back like a […]
Fiction from Emma Rose Gowans
Photo: Mahkeo I Left the Desert I’m calling mi padre on the old blue landline. I read a conspiracy theory once that our private conversations are secretly recorded as soon as we begin a call. That’s how the FBI tracks landlines—how everything you say on a landline is fair game because that’s how landlines work […]
Fiction from Anu Kumar
Photo: Yiqun Tang The City’s Last Mill The city’s last cotton mill was aging rapidly. Already its roof was spliced in half, windows in empty sheds stood bare with an old man’s toothless grin. Rubble gathered in new places every time the demolition team pulled down buildings that no longer fitted into plan. On other […]
Fiction from Kaylie Saidin
Photo: Autumn Studio Cate Lucas Cate Lucas stopped coming to class in junior year of high school and everyone wondered what happened to her. We went to a small school, and of course, people talked. She sat next to me in math during the second semester of my sophomore year. I let her borrow my […]
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