Fiction by Amy Barnes I crucify Ken with sewing pins. One goes into each of his curved hands and another to his perpetually-ready-for-shoes flat feet. The popsicle stick cross I made in Sunday School buckles under his weight. I jab harder until he’s fully impaled. “That’ll teach you to ignore my prayers.” I tell him. […]
Creative Nonfiction by Linda Parsons Digging in my drawer of ‘unmentionables,’ as ladies used to say, I thought an old camisole would work. Covid has taught me to make do or do without. I wasn’t about to lose my garden tomatoes to the birds’ swift strike, which opens them to wormy ruination. I had no […]
Fiction by Richard Holinger “Don’t go gangrene on me,” is what I tell the foot, but it has no common sense. It blames the black and smelly on me. “What you run into fenceposts for?” it asks. “Well maybe it jump out at me,” I answer because the snowmobile has got no radar. New powder […]
Creative Nonfiction by Susan Fuchtman I I took Andy and walked to some friends’ homes, just a morning out, so we weren’t there when the UPS man dropped off the package, his last stop. On his drive home, on the curve approaching the grain elevator in Page City, a gust of wind blew over his […]
Fiction by Matthew Fiander The mask’s thick cloth deadens the bell’s clanging as I walk through the Speedy Mart door. REGGIE is behind the counter, a tag on his chest announcing, as always, his name in block letters. He is startled but quietly, just a faint lifting of a brow like What’s this? He isn’t […]
Fiction by Jo Varnish The first dead mother was mine. Fifty-eight years old and dead seven Tuesdays ago, not from an incurable disease, nor from a car accident. After making a cup of chamomile tea, she slipped on a piece of slimy maple ham. Her head hit either the sink or the tile floor—the coroner’s […]
Fiction by Jack B. Bedell The old soul wakes in the top of its cypress tree, beak tucked under wing. It readies its bones for flight knowing the sun will stretch fingers over the horizon line soon. Bare branches let all the cold into its nest this time of year, but the old soul does […]
Creative Nonfiction by Marianne Worthington I. Just about this same time last year, while driving north in on Interstate 75, I saw that the highway crew had mowed down all the flowering redbud trees to widen the interstate. The sight of all that shocking pink uprooted from the earth and being piled up for burning—for […]
Fiction by Stuart Phillips “Did you bring me out here to kill me?” My grandmother filled the Buick with her thin, old woman voice; it ricocheted off the headliner as we slewed back and forth in the loose gravel. She was partly right: we were going to help an old woman die. Just not her. […]