Fiction by Colin Brightwell Quitting time at the slaughterhouse is the worst. That’s when that hard rust smell hits my nose and suffocates me. When there’s no more heavy sounds of machinery to drown out the cries of cows not knowing when it’s coming. A hard day on the killing floor, all the sweat and […]
Author: reckonreview
A Lazy Eye
Fiction by Jeff Ewing After his girlfriend runs off with her chiropractor and his brother dies of a disease no one’s seen for fifty years, invisible threats rise like weeds at the edge of Calvin’s field of vision. He tastes poison in the tap water, death in the air thick with smoke half the year. […]
Lyrics for Doomed Lovers
Fiction by Bayveen O’Connell My mood ring’s been stuck on cobalt since I saw you laid out in a grey suit that made you look like an apprentice used-car salesman. Your lips were a Common Blue butterfly pinned taut and can’t have been the same ones that fluttered on mine the summer just gone; when […]
Footsteps in the Snow
Fiction by Matthew McGuirk I followed a few steps behind my father, the faint outlines of his footprints in the spitting snow on that October morning where the light hadn’t quite squinted through the trees. My boots didn’t quite fit each of his tracks, but I could reach with a stretch from one to the […]
End of October
Fiction by Jeannie Prinsen Supper was done. After Russell went down to the parlour to watch the news, Vera started putting things away. She looked at the clock. Twenty after five. Mike down the road usually brought his children around on the early side – the littlest one got cranky as all get-out if he […]
An Imaginary Friend is a Conjured Ghost
Fiction by Victoria Buitron When we last spoke is murky like hastened water borne from a flash flood. It was after the divorce, after replacing the Maine mountains for the flat dust of Nevada, when Mom’s new boyfriend settled in with us inside adobe walls, once I had more than two friends who hardly knew […]
The Curse of Clumsy
Creative Nonfiction by Brandy Renee McCann I break things. The handle off my favorite coffee mug. The zipper of my fancy purse. I have broken the hearts of people who care about me. Just last week, while finishing a cup of sleepy tea, I knocked the teapot with my mug. Tink! I looked down and […]
The wind? I seen it alright
Fiction by Sheldon Birnie The wind, the wind, the goddamn wind off the big lake has been roaring over us for days and nights on end; sending wave after countless wave crashing into the rocky shore; howling over the roof, slapping hard at the windows, and cutting in under the eaves and through the cracks […]
Looking Skyward
Creative Nonfiction by Blake Johnson It was a blameless summer afternoon, and perhaps overhead faint cloud wisps intertwined like phantasmal fingers, drifted like angels at play. This was the day your mother gave you a few dollars to spend at the ice cream truck, to buy whatever you wanted. You sprint up the street as […]
Birds of Prey
Fiction by Kelle Schillaci Clarke Three bees come in on his sleeve. They start small but quickly transform in her mind into the size of calliope hummingbirds, thrashing around in the tent’s thick, humid air, slamming their fuzzy bodies against the canvas walls while she ducks and hides. “Hey little fella,” he says, gently cupping […]