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

Fazly Shah One Person Away from You: Stories by Andrew Bertaina, Moon City Press, 2021 Reviewed by Andrew Gretes Andrew Bertaina’s debut short-story collection, One Person Away from You (winner of the 2020 Moon City Short Fiction Award), is the answer to the counterfactual: “What if Proust wrote flash?” Like Proust’s wayward narrator, Bertaina’s characters are simultaneously pursuing and pursued by the past, and it’s precisely this position (smack in the middle of the tempora

by Andrew Bertaina Manny Becerra We were up early to walk our dogs, the sky was a pale green, and the dogs peed lazily on the birch trees in a pattern of their own making when we saw the man who had leveled the city on the plain. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with reddish grey hair and a short beard. We had seen his face on posters and in short films, pictured it sometimes, in our nightmares. Naturally, our eyes followed him. He slipped into a small store while we watched, p