Fiction

John K. Peck Jaap Straydog The smell of mushroom soup filled the small house. Mother carried the large black pot to the table, and Father brought out the small bowl of crisp fried bits to sprinkle into it. “What did you say these were again?” asked Mother. “Pfifferlings,” replied Father. “They go well,” said Mother, sipping her soup. “I agree,” said Father, sipping. “Toothsome.” As if to prove his point, he chewed slightly. “I always liked that word,” said Mother. Several mom

by Nancy Connors Daniel Sinoca And on the third night, the younger sister spilled her milk again, and their father slammed his hand on the table and said, “Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?” and the mother scrambled to mop it up, and the older sister leaped to help, and the younger sister began to weep, and their father yelled out, “Sit down!”, and the mother and older sister sat, and silently they watched the milk flow over the tablecloth, and their father ate, staring a

by Liz Stewart Vincent van Zalinge Love is growing inside me. I float in fields of honeyed grass. Me and a colony of grasses, a worm, a milkweed, a thistle, and a family of ants form a messy row on the ground. Here is the place my mother watched for birds. She called it sanctuary. Her ashes were scattered here. I am pregnant and my baby is love. My baby craves birdsong and makes me throw up the sound of Ninja blenders. It doesn’t matter how pure my wife’s intentions — she’s m

by David Luntz Bob Brewer I had this dream once about an ape playing with a hand grenade. I even wrote a story about it [1]. In the story it’s unclear whether I live or die when the ape pulls out the pin and swallows the grenade. The story had a line that went, “Each passing moment plays its own requiem no matter what we do.” I am not sure what I was trying to say by it. Nor am I sure what the story meant. Maybe the ape represented fate or chance. Maybe the story was about th

by Karla Hirsch Ekaterina Boltaga PART I — THE LOSS In this story, the reason is not relevant. One day, the person you’ve shared gestures and words with for the last x years, is gone. They left / you drove them away / they found a new life / they misplaced the keys. The most outrageous versions of their leaving you, read like fictions: they went out to buy cigarettes and never came back / they joined a cult because life is overwhelming, babe / they’ve had a two-year affair wi

by Kathryn Kulpa Ian Taylor I don’t know if what we did could be called love. A furtive scrabble in the dark underpasses between our other lives. In someone’s empty office, in convention center greenrooms. I was always asking you for something. Breath mints. Safety pins to pull myself together. Things you never carried. Our affair was like a tangerine, juicy but just too seedy. We’d try to give each other up, then fly together after two weeks, thirsty, lost, your hands holdin

by Ani King Alex Begin To park two big ass trucks too close together at a gas station, both rumbling up and shuddering to a stop, nose-angled at each other over the painted lines? What if you park two trucks too close together on purpose after your ten-year high school reunion, still rumbling and shuddering to a stop, but this time in the parking lot of a motel two towns over? And what if you park two trucks together two towns over and you rent one of those motel rooms with a

by Sarp Sozdinler Hans Isaacson WHO: The girl, eight going on nine, half-Assyrian, half-blind, born in the north bend of Southeastern Anatolia, a daughter to Aisha Maria Rohan, by way of Raqqa, by way of her father’s motherland, formerly a struggling second-grader, now a farmhand to her grandparents, lies sidelong on the side of a dirt road, her arms scissored backward, her head a porcelain doll lolling in a puddle of rainwater slowly reddening around the edges, the rivulets

by Barlow Adams Sies Kranen My wife’s tracks in the mud mingled with those of the ducks until I couldn’t tell where anything began or ended. From the house to the creek at the edge of our yard and back, a parade of webbed feet encircling the memory of my wife’s careful, deliberate steps, her stride short, the way people walked when they were carrying something precious. Her attachment didn’t bother me at first. I thought it could even be positive after we had to give up the b

by Michael Czyzniejewski Sander Sammy When the marauders came, Abel made sandwiches. He knew soldiers were always hungry, and if there’s one thing that might save his skin, it was a good spread. He considered fanning out the meats and cheeses on his largest serving tray, letting the marauders pick what they wanted, but he decided to make and tag everything himself. The largest plate held ham and cheddar, surrounded by several turkey and Swiss, a few roast beef and jack, and a

by Aubri Kaufman Jeremy Hynes The bird is back again. I haven’t seen it in a while. No one has. The town Facebook group started a thread about it. Someone laments over its absence. Someone notes that it’s basically the town mascot. Wonders where it could’ve gone. Hopes it isn’t dead. Someone else says it snapped at her dog once, so good riddance. Someone questions whether it’s a crane or a heron. Whether it’s maybe gone south for the winter. I don’t know if cranes or herons g

by Susan L. Lin Daniel Gomez I. The writer fox is a dying breed, rejecting the aid of widely available technologies like laptops, typewriters, and even fountain pens. Instead, the fox turns to his old-fashioned quill and ink every morning, warm and toasty inside a side burrow not too far from the den where his vixen and kits sleep. He must take advantage of this peaceful hour to scratch down five hundred words daily. Today though, the fox has barely gotten started on his new

by Francine Witte AARN GIRI/Unsplash My girl Is vanilla bean, Lies on the floor like a scraggled mop. One day she makes me breakfast. More than a dozen eggs or so. It is all bubble and scramble, And I would tell her everything if I thought she could take it, but she can’t, she would curl up like steam, float out the window like an old butterfly. One time we waited together for the refrigerator man to come. It was hours, it was days, and then he showed up, turned the cold back

by Craig Foltz Vincent Keiman It’s almost dusk. I sit on a recliner at a co-worker’s backyard BBQ. The people nearest me resemble multibeam wavelengths of yellowish-blue light. One of them, a woman, says, “In lieu of human contact, I suggest retreating further into the subconscious realm.” She hands me a topographical map of the ocean floor, crisscrossed with illegible annotations. One large section of the map is blurry and undecipherable. The woman shrugs. “Think of that par

by Ryan Griffith Jill Marv He worked the Genesis, the Starlite, the Mystic, spying through his porthole into the velveteen. We were just kids waiting below, supplicants praying to his altar of night. He was our projectionist. On screen he showed us men made of meat and light and desire, Dean and Brando, libidos slithering through our jeans. We studied the blades of their faces, the cock of their jaws, the ways they sharpened themselves against the dullness of the world. Somet

by Bethany Cutkomp Pawan Parihar Pretty sure the new kid can make himself transparent. Literally, as in, vanishing in the middle of our chemistry experiments. I used to think he’d just dip out of class when I wasn’t paying attention but, now assigned as his lab partner, I’ve witnessed his body dematerialize before my very eyes. Poof. Absent as if he wasn’t even there to begin with. In chemistry, we call this chromism, which I may or may not be pulling out of my ass. Sean make

by Mureall Hebert Alexander Grey Page 87 out of Recipes from a Magickal Cookbook Gold-Gilded Cottage Cheese (aka Transformation Tapenade) Ingredients: · Gold Leaf · Cottage Cheese Backstory: Polyphemus (aka Ole One-Eye; Mr. Cyclops; El Gigantor) stored milk in animal stomachs, creating the world’s first cottage cheese. Odysseus (aka The Braggart; Mr. Complicated) tied himself to the underside of a sheep’s stomach to escape being eaten by Polyphemus. Odysseus sailed away, but

by Catherine Roberts Lazar Gugleta When we kiss, I fill the holes in his teeth with my tongue, open my eyes while his green ones stay closed, see the discount-stickered candle burning steady on his coffee table and I’m there, in the backyard watching Dad set fire to the I’m-leaving-you-note and satin dresses and g-strings and coupons and souvenir dish towels — rip-crack-whoosh — the scarves of fire groping at my mother’s things making my chest flicker and my fingertips prickl

by Jody Hobbs Hesler Lotus Design N Print At Celia’s house, everything is spotless. The sun shines brighter in her living room than it does in yours, and the food tastes better than anything you make. Not a smudge of lipstick smears her perfect white teeth, and her waist is still as trim as yours hasn’t been since freshman year of high school. The point of the gathering is the silent auction for the local food bank that Celia arranges each year. You live in the same neighborh

by Cathy Ulrich Gregory Upper I’m writing a story where you grow up in a blue house. Periwinkle blue, with white trim and a green yard and sprinklers that make a sound like chk-chk-chk. And every morning, you wake up to chk-chk-chk and the chitter and rustle of fluttery birds with round black eyes and soft brown wings. And there are flowers of course, in this story I’m writing. Pretty little flowers that bow in the wind and shine with morning dew. Your neighbors wave when the