Category: Fiction

by Ryan Pollard       It was midevening when the two friends ordered food at the bar. Charlie, the smaller one, glanced around the place. “Pretty dead todight, huh?”      The bigger one, Jeremy, grasped his mug of Bud Light like a barbell, his thick fingers wedged under the handle as though locked in place. He sipped through the…

by Dana Blatte       Lina first tasted moonlight when she was small enough to fit in her mother’s palm like a present. She had been born the size of a pinky nail, and as rounded and peach-pink as one too. To her family, this was no surprise; Lina’s aunt had emerged folded like an origami swan,…

by Tina Silver In 1982, Markham, Ontario, was a populous but irrelevant Toronto satellite, straddling the line between rural and suburban. At my high school, every student was white, depressed to some degree, and trying to act older. If you were sixteen—and I was—you were more often asked, “Where do you work?” than, “Are you…

by Spencer Wise Mark Bergman was standing to the right of the bema, which faced Zack Stein’s good side according to his mother. Mark didn’t have the heart to break it to Susan that at thirteen every side was awful—but particularly here, beneath the windows of Temple Emmanuel, where the backlight washed him out. The…

by Anthony Correale Our city is built into the crack where the Red-Nosed Mountains meet, scaling nearly to their spherical rubber peaks, the city’s foot spreading wide into the beautiful bowtie-shaped bay. The Elder Clowns for which we are famous sleep their twisted rag doll sleep entwined about the city’s gates, doubled over its tall…

by Katelynn Jasper Abigail looks at the bandaged spot on her hand clasped in prayer with the other. For a brief moment, it had looked like that of the unsullied cloth wrapped around the waist of the church’s Crucifixion of Jesus. Now it is a deep red, stiff with dried blood.      She is grateful for the…

by Madeline Graham It is ninety-five degrees in July and the pool is packed. He stands on the staircase leading into the shallow end, no arm floaties on. We hope that he will be the next to join us.      There is the fat backside of an old man in trunks, popping through a too-small innertube floating…

by Madison Bakalar Sara first met Dillon at the Chinese restaurant down the block from her apartment. It was a quiet night, rainy. A Tuesday. The windows were greasy from customers perusing the daily specials pasted to the glass. She had seen him before on the street, in passing. He was sometimes on her train…

by Laura Leigh Morris When the baby’s mouth closes over her nipple, Irene goes from half asleep to painfully awake. The chapped cracks in her areola come alive, and she whimpers. The baby snarfles and gasps as he suckles, a hungry little thing.      Insatiable, Irene called him at his four-week-old appointment. The doctor nodded, said they…

by Jaydn DeWald Rolled out before us: a path of stain-resistant bronze. Tufted, hand-knotted, flat-woven, loomed. For walking across, bare- or sock-footed, holding a mug of warm milk. With viscose fringe. Geometric borders. Into which she would crush a tube of maroon lipstick. What patterns do you see? Map of sand dunes, map of riotous…