Category: Fiction

By Melissa Llanes Brownlee Grandpa yells, cursing those fuckers who killed Daisy, and Mom tells him to calm down, yelling not going do nothing, and Grandpa says, we should bachi them, send the black kahuna after them, and Mom tells him what that going do and she never believe that kine stuff anyway, and I’m…

by Julia Leef       It’s raining. No one knows it yet, but this is the final day of what we will later designate as “the before times.” People duck for cover beneath umbrellas, shelter in their homes, and hurry down sidewalks to avoid being drenched by the soaking, harmless water. We close our window shades, pray…

By Lucie Turkel       My last great manic high started at the Beverly Hilton and fuck did it feel good. Sun on my face. Ocean spray. Eating half a croissant all day smoking cigarettes by myself fuck did it feel good.      It was overcast when I got there of course. I didn’t care. I was there for…

By Lilah Webb       He’s wheeled in and he screams. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was afraid. But you do. He’s happy to see you. Even if he doesn’t know who you are.      “James,” he says. You pretend not to know why he’s taken to calling your father by his middle name. The…

By Charlotte Bruckner He says he has a stigmata and I know he means astigmatism but in my mind I am already pinning him to the cross. He says at night he sees every light like an apocalypse, like the end of days. Sitting next to him in the car with the world streaking around…

Delaney Kelly       Aileen Aberdeen might have blamed the dressing room fluorescents for her sallow complexion, the way her skin, taut as taffy, stretched and retained the shape of the tug, before melting like candle wax down her chin—if only she weren’t so hungry. Even her cigarette breaks ’neath the blazing sun did little to restore…

by Blair Hurley       Her great-grandmother, so she’s been told, lost many children. They were Kansas people, prairie people, who lived in a remote dust-battered town and worshiped in a bare whitewashed church, the singular steeple the tallest thing around for miles. They were Christian Scientists.      Going through her great-grandmother’s things in the hot attic of their…

by Becky Petterson       They meet in the middle at the park in their childhood neighborhood. The grass is yellow and shriveled, the leaves already curling toward their mortality. The two women embrace, the distance between them a living topography impossible to measure.      “You cut your hair,” Sarah says reaching forward, and Ruth fingers the blunt black…

by Brittany Micka-Foos Jamestown, Virginia, 2002       I pluck a tobacco beetle from the sticky underside of a leaf, hold it between my thumb and forefinger, and watch it writhe. This is my summer job. I am sixteen years old, and I am testing my powers.      We stand in a small plot simulacrum of a tobacco field.…

by William Kitcher       I have been asked by the editors of this fine and august magazine to write an introduction to my short story, “Brides Glue Component.” I’m very flattered to have received this request for two reasons. The first is that I have never been invited to do so before, and the second is…