I wake up face-down on cold vinyl tile, my sweaty cheek glued to the gray-specked floor. My mouth tastes like someone juiced a cigarette, poured it into a rotten durian, and forced it all down my throat. For a second, I think I’ve died in a stranger’s apartment. Then I see my crusty Jordan 1’s stuck on the ceiling fan.
Continue reading “Bangkok, If You’re Listening by Prin Sairungsri”
I don’t like to complain.
When you live in a neighborhood, side-by-side with other home owners, there’s a little give-and-take that has to go on. On one side of us there’s the Cummings. The Cummings are in their fifties and almost every Sunday they have a little family barbecue, their two sons and their families come over and the kids, they’re still kids, and they make a little noise but Fred Cummings is a good guy and I don’t mind the smoke from his grill because what he’s cooking usually smells good. By seven o’clock, they’re long gone.
Continue reading “I Don’t Like to Complain by Russell Dupont”
I’m Lloyd Landover (aka Low), and this is the first day of high school for my twin sister Linda (aka Falling Down Girl) and me.
Our Mom is Lidia Landover, and she works with numbers for the federal government. She’s not a mathematician, statistician, physicist, astronomer, actuary, or accountant.
Mom doesn’t solve math problems. She doesn’t create theories based on math. She plays very intently with every level of math, and somewhere in the results are stuff the government really wants. She calls her work “math doodling.”
Continue reading “The Landovers by Frederick K Foote”
A moment before the horror begins.
Imagine two ruthless creatures, each a child’s worst—and often last—nightmare. The first fiend
is a shape-shifting monster. He terrorizes and devours children in the guise of Pennywise, an evil clown. Pennywise gained public attention in a book by a famous American author. The book is purported to be fiction, but this was a ruse to hide the author’s desperate fear of the main character, Pennywise. Alas, the child-eating clown is all too real.
Our second nightmare is the officially sanctioned kidnapper and imprisoner of children, the notorious Child Catcher. This greasy villain from the land of Vulgaria came to notoriety in the documentary film Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
An ocean separates these two terrors, and we must be grateful for this small blessing. For if these monsters should ever meet… No! It is too horrible to contemplate!
Continue reading “Penny Catch by Marco Etheridge”
About the Author
Hahn Moo-Sook (1918-1993) was a native of Seoul whose first artistic aspirations lay in painting, but she subsequently devoted her creative life to literature, publishing at least eight volumes of fiction during her lifetime and serving with distinction in the Korea branch of International P.E.N., in which capacity she brought many world-famous authors to the attention of a Korean audience. She is perhaps best known in English for Encounter: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Korea, translated by Ok Young Kim Chang with a Foreword by Don Baker and published by the University of California Press.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – On Cloud Nine by Hahn Moo-Sook”
When the storms end and the first rays of the sun finally penetrate through and around the dark clouds and the temperatures rise, that means new potential has returned. For the last while, it has been impossible to really do anything other than exhaust existing provisions and rest and stay as warm and dry as reality allowed, and usually that meant not so warm and only moderately dry, but that didn’t mean it was bad because it wasn’t. It was fine.
Continue reading “What is Offered by Chris Klassen”
Bells and drums – the jingle of a cavalry troop’s harness, the thump of hooves on a dusty road – announced the arrival of riders in gray at a bridge in Georgia in July, 1864. Most of the soldiers dismounted while their captain rode onto the bridge and halted before two figures, an old black woman holding a sack and a child.
Continue reading “One Stone by Robert Walton”
I rummage for footwear in the dumpster here at the train station, where all routes lead uphill. I carry a big pack with a sleeping bag and tarp, which I hauled from the bus after I forgot my shoes. When you have no shoes, you have no direction. My wife Samantha, left me as I bent over to take them off. She stepped down the bus aisle in a floppy floral hat and a blue chemise and when I looked up, she was gone.
Continue reading “Searching for Samantha by Harrison Kim”
The line of people stretched all the way around the block. It was 1983, it was Rome, and Mr. Castano’s sculpture work was in high demand for movie sets, fashionistas, and pranksters. The artist also reserved a certain amount of his time to help the injured or disabled with realistic or artistic prosthetics. I was a customer close to this latter category, though the only person I wanted to look right for was myself.
Continue reading “Pinocchio’s Puppet by L.A. Fields (Adult content)”
The train rattled through the trench of the tracks, rocking Bill and Lon like children on a carnival ride. With each stop, the Christmas crowd leaked away, clusters of homes seen out the windows dwindled to an isolated few until they were flying past banks of leafless trees and brown fields fissured by frozen marshes, their view widening to the glow of the evening skyline.
Continue reading “The Wrong Road by Cris Aboobaker”
