Fiction

by Marvin Shackelford Lucas van Oort 1. At the head of the lake I tell Brenda over the phone it’s my goddamn house too, I’ve paid my time and money, and it’s my endless goddamn life as much as hers. She’s taken me by surprise. Across the weak waves the water narrows, runs long and slender to the earthen dam and parking lot, unseen beyond, where we started. I’ve come too far. A few camo-green paddleboats circle like predators flipped wrong-side up. Fins disappearing somewhere

by Derek Heckman Avery Cocozziello You teach kindergarten. You work with children eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, and you have done this for the past eight years — you know when one of them is a werewolf. The signs are all there: The inability to sit still. The ferocious irritation caused by too-tight clothing or the approach of inclement weather. The fur and the fangs and the tail. All red flags. It isn’t that she’s a bad kid, you tell your coworkers

by Joel Hans Mulyadi/Unsplash I expect pandemonium in the pediatric wing when the anesthesiologists stop showing up, but the doctors and nurses soon realize they don’t need anesthesiologists. After delivering lunch to the children, my cart empty but a bowlful of fish food, I stop by the tank where the oscar fish, Oscar, lives. No children need anesthesia anymore, I say to Oscar. Not here. Not anywhere. Oscar keeps bubbles as baubles beneath a thimble of stones. It’s so quiet,

by Andrew Bertaina Chris Boese Once, when father and I were both on the cusp of middle age, he and I went fishing together in the foothills a few miles from his apartment. This was years after the invention of time travel, when the technology had become so ubiquitous even people like me could afford it. Elon Musk had already seen the birth of Christ and Jose Canseco at peak steroid use and related biceps. What was left now, were just the scraps for sad sacks like me. As we dr

by L.A. Shortliffe Jason Leung A gold foil box. Nestled within the inner folds of black velvet, gilded dragonflies circle red lacquered chopsticks. They shine with lack of use. These are only for good. Unfurling a rice-paper scroll reveals sumi-e sparrows in flight amongst stalks of bamboo. Grind the sumi until it is black as pitch. There’s an old spam container, edges rusting, label fading — serving as home to a dance of carefully folded paper cranes. Sakura blossoms and koi

by Elizabeth Horner Turner Gareth Harrison I am still here, the crash just a feathery echo now, and my shadow darts about when it should be dabbing my wounds and helping me up. I wish I could get this letter to you, darling, dearie, sweeth-pea o’ my heart, because then I could continue to torment you as one does in the shoulder-tapping, neck-kissing way of those with our type of relationship. The type we bought after agonizing together at Home Depot. You wanted the motherload

by Kathryn Kulpa Hu Chen 1. The girl in first grade with the big glasses that took up half her face and one lens was smogged over because she had lazy eye and you asked to borrow her milk money to get chocolate milk and she said she only had enough for one but she’d give you her milk if you’d be her friend and you said you would and you sat with her that day in the cafeteria, but never again. 2. The man in the orange prole cap in the white pickup who followed you for miles on

Melissa Llanes Brownlee RKTKN/Unsplash You wen collect da hair and fingernails he asks as his puffy white hair dances in the ocean breeze and you answer yeah, yeah I did, no worries but you worry don’t you no worries me if you never do it, you not going get what you want he scolds through broken teeth, his breath, rotting fish and seaweed, I stay know Tutu I wen get ’em you insist okay den put ’em on the table and you place upon the weathered picnic table in front of him the

by Shome Dasgupta Kyle Johnson Dear Monica, My name is Shome Dasgupta, and I just wanted to see if you’d be up for taking a look at a flash fiction piece I recently wrote. It’s called “I’ll Never Know” (670 words), and this one is really important to me — though it’s fiction, it’s also a narrative I experienced not too long ago, and to make sense out of it all, I had to shift it into words, I guess. It doesn’t make that much sense, to be honest, so I just wrote it as fiction 

by Rick White Stefan Widua One September morning, when the moon has brought a chill to the late summer air, Cleo the cat worries at a drystone wall, trying to find a way into the orchard. The blushing fruit hangs heavy on the trees, or else sits and rots sweetly on the ground, having already given itself to the fall. Cleo purrs and squawks and chirrups and scritch-scratches the stones, questioning each in turn. Her bushy tail dances in the breeze, her whiskers twitch with ant

by Will Musgrove Brandon Morgan I blame the time I stuck a fork in an outlet for why I can’t sleep. I was four, and mom was in the other room because dad was somewhere else. How’d I get the fork? Have you ever gone to set the table and thought: Don’t we have more forks than this? That’s how I got the fork. The shock singed off my little eyebrows, shriveled my fingernails into miniature raisins. Now, I get an occasional electric shiver, an occasional bout of insomnia. Mom says

by Teddy Engs Nick Jones When Dad paddles in I’m like thank God, no more sitting alone on this stupid beach, no more squinting against the violent sea-glare, no more trying to will him from his endless catch-a-wave-then-paddle-back-out cycle, counting down from ten, counting up from one, pleading let this be the last one let this be the last one each time a wave suggests itself on the horizon, but now, as Dad bellyrides the whitewater, dismounts in the shallows, marches again

by Avra Margariti McGill Library We listen to the heartbeats of the walls. The hummingbirds trapped inside wood panels and wainscoting. Apotropaic mummies, you say. Gods-in-the-making. We don’t know who suffers the most splinters: your earshells, or my fingertips. Soon your belly bulges like the moon, like the new house expanding with nightfall. The tocking creak of tick-infested wood. Condensation covers your stretching skin, an atavistic, immaculate conception. You tell me,

by Sara Solberg Jacob Granneman Icarus is a scrappy sort, so when he wakes up after the crash, swollen eyes blinking slow and owlish against the hospital’s harsh fluorescent light, the first thing he tells you is that he wants to buy a candle that smells like space. Space is red-hot metal and spent gasoline, he says, and as he wakes up more, those swollen eyes pool with wonder. Space is the ringing silence left in a shot bullet’s wake. Space lingers like an auto shop lingers

by Kyle E. Miller Elena Mozhvilo Exhibit A. One morning in December, a feral cat slipped inside Kyle’s apartment when he left the door open so he could carry all the groceries in at once. The cat saw heat leaking from the open door like an orange paper fan unfolded and ducked inside, hiding herself under the futon. Kyle didn’t notice the cat until that evening, when he smelled a sweet, fetid odor suggestive of mud and feces. He studied signs and symbols for a living and thoug

by SJ Han Mark Rolfe A father and his grown son have dinner together for the first time in years. They walk down main street, candied lights strung between the streetlamps for holiday season. The father insists that the son choose where to eat. The son lingers around an Italian restaurant halfway below ground level. “Here?” the father asks. His son descends the steps without an answer. From behind, the father gazes at clumsily cropped hair. A stripped-down piano melody runs t

by Kevin Grauke Abigail Lynn It would be turning cold soon, so Woodrow was hard at work in the garden on the edge of the forest, pulling carrots out of the dirt, when his son came home from his new school with a question for him: “Dad, do you know how to chuck wood?” Woodrow turned away from his work, brushed the dirt from his hair, and looked at his son. He’d known his whole life that this day would come, but knowing didn’t make the reality of it any easier to bear. “How com

by Chris Haven Stephen Leonardi This alien stopped by last night. You don’t have to believe me. He parked his spaceship, I guess you could call it parked, among the birch trees in my backyard. The leaves shook like in a light breeze. It wasn’t as loud as you’d think but I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t notice. They’re pretty self-involved, I guess. Anyway, he comes in and he’s very green. I say very green. Green is green, but I’m hoping you know what I mean when I say he wa

by Francine Witte Cristian Palmer Grab of waterfingers under your toes and horizon sailboats. This could be anywhere but it’s not. It’s not your ice cream ocean from when you were nine, and your mother held a towel around you as you wriggled into dryer clothes. Not the goodbye sand when Bobby Epstein kissed you one last twilight time, his face lit up by the bonfire collapsing, snapping, and Julie Mitchell’s face lit up sudden behind him. Now, the sea creeps deeper, up around

by Abby Manzella Isaac Quesada Jake tosses the baby into the air like a pizza — not violently, not angrily like Naomi always accuses him of being. He tosses the baby like the lightness of dough aloft, like a meal of your own making when the spray of flour coats your hands and cheeks — just like he and Naomi did when they were kids and it was Cooking Night at the Cantors’: that’s what his mother called it. His father would throw the dough into the air bellowing Jim Morrison’s