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”
Brutal, late May. Wet blankets of hot weather, suffocating. When the midday heat receded, Thomas nixed the novellas (Mattie’s legacy), filled a tall glass with seltzer and ice, and padded into the yard. He sprayed the concrete and his chair, sat on the damp fabric facing east toward the fishtail palm and the privacy fence, looking up at the eaves of the cottages the far side of the street. Old Florida. Wood and stucco. Termites and social security checks. Not yet gentrified.
Continue reading “Ascension by Nigel Pugh”
As I pulled into an almost vacant lot in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the cars of the few Saturday patrons and library staff parked, I noticed a pale woman wearing a cream-colored dress, its lace browned faintly around the cuffs. Her face possessed the pale stillness of old photographs. Her eyes shifted strangely, as if several people were considering me from behind them at once.
“Good morning,” I said to her.
Continue reading “Specificity by Ryan Scribner”
“Where are you a bishop then?” she asked, eyes darting around his drawing room, drinking in the fur and velvet, taffeta and silk.
“I’m tempted to say Bath and Wells,” he chuckled, perched earnestly on the armchair. His guest had slipped off her shoes and, cat-like, tucked her feet comfortably away.
Continue reading “Reconciled to Eternity by P.R. Woods”
“A dream fulfilled is a dream lost.”
—Mickey Lafferty
The year Rosemarie Zuccarrelli moved away from Ninety Second Street to live with her maternal relatives in the Midwest, we were thirteen.
She quickly metastasized into likenesses and lies, was diluted by adaptations and revisions I fabricated to fill forward the missing frames. I did what most teenaged boys did: I played sports, pushed my luck with inaccessible girls, snuck beers, and cheated on tests. I wrote poems. Spare poems I did not share, poems touching upon alienation and nothingness, the depths of the surrounding black and unyielding ocean, and the silence of God in the world.
I idolized her.
Continue reading “Twolips by Gerry Coleman”
She had done the same thing every evening for three years.
She would pour tea into a cup with a chipped rim, sit by the window, pick up her phone, and dial a number.
The same voice, every time.
“The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable.”
Continue reading “The Last Number by Arpi Vanyan”
Peggy Garrett must have been glad that Geary’s had given up on the old way and got a ramp fitted. For years I’d watched her lump poor Jim up the step, the wheels catching on the threshold, before she’d lean forward to see to him, like a magpie claiming a crust. She, always in black with her wispy hair that had turned white the night of the accident.
Continue reading “Baby’s Breath by Leanne Simmons”
By Chancellorsville, his camera had grown heavier, the straps of its leather case cutting into his shoulders, the sway of its brass and wood bruising his ribs. Among the war dead he had photographed, he lacked one, his sister, Ana, who had died two years earlier in a field hospital outside Fredericksburg. Fever, they’d said. By the time he found her name in a ledger, no body was left to claim.
Continue reading “Ana in the Negative by R W Owen”
“You scary pretty,” she said, settling onto the lattice bench. She wasn’t her, but she looked at me the same way, as if she knew the part. Ever since Celeste’s funeral, I kept finding her inside strangers. I checked the time out of habit. The second hand trembled near the six. The woman was small inside a brown trench coat made of possum fur, seams hand-stitched with thick black wax taxidermy thread. The woman kept her eye on me, then threw a coin into the fountain beside us.
Continue reading “Inside the Possum Coat by Patrick G. Roland”
The music thumped up the stairs towards him in the queue. I’m way too old for this he thought, edging forwards. Much had changed since last time he had been to a night club; more remained the same. Ticket checked on his phone, driver’s license scanned. Why? No one in their right mind could possibly think he was 18, his age telling in the wrinkles on his face, the receding, greying hair, the middle-aged spread. But also in invisible ways: twinges, aches, sadness.
Continue reading “Boots and Cats by John Tregoning”
