Fictions from Marvin Shackelford
Photo by Ryan Wallace Nashville The city swallows the stars. It swallows swampland and pasture and sends the hills into hiding. Its breath rattles. Out of its mouth drives an armored convoy bearing missiles, sandbags, rations, maps, ransoms, the missives of every war we ever might fight. From my front door I see them march […]
Fiction from Suzanne Samples
Photo by Stefano Zocca Water Signs No one ever talks about him, you say. When the pastor listed him at Dad’s funeral, I couldn’t figure out who he was. At least ten years younger than the rest of us, you do not remember. You do not remember the shoebox casket, the shivering January shoulders, the […]
Fiction from Lee Hamblin
Photo by rawpixel In-Locked-Out Asleep Soft fingers brush across my forehead like whispers of love. A voice. A man’s voice, yes, tranquil, yes, but only on the surface. I know you can hear me, he says. Footsteps approach. The hand pulls away sharply. The same voice, though now turned elsewhere and unmasked. They ran a […]
Fiction from Amy Lee Lillard
Photo by Federico Beccari Pretty Girls Make Graves . HER “Rosie.” In a message of static, the name was clear. “Rosie.” Forty nine seconds, the message ran. From an unknown number with a distant area code. When I first played it, on the way to the small cabin off Route 84, I was only half-listening. […]
Fiction from Jon Alston
Photo by Jez Timms Hypotheses It wasn’t even the Absolute degree of infinity Georg needed to know. A simple explanation of the transfinite degrees apparent in the structure of his alephs. The current diagram no longer suited his needs: Circles inherently carried no mathematical properties, he concluded, but denoted only the principal of all […]
Fiction from Kathryn Megan Starks
Photo by Naomi Tamar Harvest Hulls Peter Peter pumpkin eater, Had a wife but couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell, And there he kept her very well. Getting into the thing was harder than she would have imagined. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked herself, how does one climb into […]
Fiction from Josh Patrick Sheridan
Chicago, 1987 According to the schedule, the train will be coming in two minutes. There will be lots of people on board—a Saudi exile, a former welterweight boxer, a family of twelve with tickets to the aquarium’s new PenguinTown show. Women and men will be holding hands, their noses nestled into each other’s fur-lined corduroy, […]
Fiction from Jude Conlee
By the Side of the Road I could do so much more than the stain-ridden state of a world has left me. I could make so many more things out of what rushes by me but my eyes always blink, I can’t hold my lids steady and the everything around is blurs of red and […]
Fiction from Simon Phillips
The Hero’s Return Maybe you won’t believe me but it’s true—I had that thing happen to me we all fear. Sometimes we play the scenario out in our twisted minds to torture ourselves, like the sore on your tongue you scrape with your teeth because really you like the pain. A classic. So I’m walking […]
Fiction from Lynn Brown
Searching for the Jazz “Well there was my first boyfriend, the only one I had in high school. He was a real sweetie, real SCA that one…born in the wrong time period for sure. It was something we had in common. He was all courtly manners and hand kissing. He used to call me his […]
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