Category: Fiction

by Paul Stinson       Kids aren’t stupid. They see everything. They’re full of questions, too. Not that we have too many answers.      I just say, “We’re going to have you feeling much better soon, sweetie. Trust me.”      The smallest ones sometimes get spooked around all the doctors and nurses. They get scared of all the equipment. It helps…

by Adam Greenberg When the front entrance falters, and shortly thereafter the back, naturally we MacGyver all manner of workarounds. The architect, bless him, runs around like Noah plugging holes in his ark. But when the windows pose a problem, and when even the chimney proves impassable, my wife and I go out of our…

by Angela Townsend       Harriet would not be satisfied until I went out onto my balcony. It would be better if I went to ground level, but she would compromise. She texted me five blurry pictures of the full moon.       “Go outside! Soak up this moon energy!”      If Harriet ran the electric company, no one would receive a…

by Dana Jean Rider       Tumbleweeds are significant safety hazards to cars and bodies alike on desert highways. They catch inside wheel wells when drivers speed over them—they mess up machinery, wrap their spiny limbs around tire axles. Large tumbleweeds can even break windshields when launched by another car’s spinning wheels.      You think they must also be…

by Meg Mullins When you are a cabbage and I am still your wife, I will drag my fingers across your first tender leaves and remember your skin. You will be intimate with the soil and the worms that live there, and I will find some comfort in that. There is magic happening in the…

by Jenny Fried       A story for you: two boys get on the train together, and they are not in love. The first boy is very tall, the other is less so. The short boy has bleached his eyebrows with lemon juice, the tall boy does not know yet how to buy clothes that fit him.…

by Brenna Lemieux       There was no knock, or if there was I didn’t hear it. Just the front door opening, that sigh of pressure exchange. Had I drifted off? Hard to say. Max had conked out in the toddler bed beside me, finally. A difficult day: Pat at a gig, and the news I couldn’t…

By Franz Jørgen Neumann       Martin is smitten the first time he sees the woman with the sexy nose. Neither pixie nor Roman, Jenny’s nose is longer than most, with comely nostrils. He tries not to stare as he takes the key she offers him. He thanks her for the bag of warm rolls, then carries…

by Anthony Abboreno       Claudette and Adam stood outside their RV, staring at the fish Adam had caught. Claudette hadn’t realized anything that huge grew in the Mississippi. It was the size of a Saint Bernard, its flesh gouged with scars like trails on an old mountain. Now, it lay in an inflatable wading pool decorated…

by Sophie Panzer My nosebleed starts seven days after my parents’ funeral. The virus takes them quickly, my mother right after my father, that first plague winter. I do not invite anyone to the cemetery with me except the rabbi. People offer to come anyway, but I refuse—it seems wrong for the living to risk…