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MORGAN TURNS DOWN THE HEAT | Fiction by Kurt Engstrom
Morgan stops to look out the kitchen window at the farmyard. The wind-scoured hardpan rimes a week-old skiff of snow with blow dirt that eddies across the ground like a nest of mice swarming a bad dream. The sun is bright, and the sky is an awful blue. The thermometer on the windowsill outside the…
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BURNING AND DROWNING | Creative Nonfiction by Megan Hanlon
The house was so dark during those long winter evenings without electricity. You and I did our homework by the light of a hurricane lamp and the weak beams of setting sun that managed to crawl through the dining room window. The kitchen, with no windows except one over the sink that inexplicably opened into…
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SONG OF THE CONFESSOR | Fiction By G. A. Rivers
I know you wouldn’t want me to be doing what I’m doing right now, sitting in a deserted dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen, having a beer with my former manager. Emphasis on the word former is what you’d say to me with a tug on my sleeve and a show of eyes, the first salvo…
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INSIDE | Fiction by K.A. Polzin
The last time my father left the house was for a trip with us to Kmart one sunny day when I was eight: Dad shopped for household items, and my older brother and I walked the aisles, looking at the toys and games. Then, never again. He came home for good. There was no announcement,…
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IT TAKES A TOLL | Fiction by Margo Griffin
Dressed in frayed, ripped jeans, a well-worn sweatshirt, and grease-stained vest, the toll collector conducts his business in a long, narrow makeshift tollbooth full of weeds and commuter trash. Splits erupt across his lips like jagged fault lines and tiny red and purple blotches pepper his face like berries, reminding me of our father after…
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COUNTRY CRAFT: What does it matter?
By Stuart Phillips “Thank you for your service.” I have a viscerally ambivalent reaction when someone says that to me. Sure, I spent over a decade in the Army as a small cog in the Big Green Machine. I understand that part of my discomfort with the rote patriotism of these throwaway thanks is my…
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A FINE INVENTION | Fiction by Jason Escareno
Rogers has more religion in his left nut than other people have in their entire body. Not enough to turn water into wine. He hasn’t tried that. He doesn’t drink. But he can do things that can’t be explained. Like change someone’s mind. Influence grain prices. Raise a child from the dead. He just tweaks…
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OUR BRIGHT FUTURE | Creative Nonfiction by Blue Guldal
“Ain’t Montana preedy?” Cowboy said, sweeping his arms across the orange-pink sunset. We’d met him in a bar late afternoon. The girls called him Cowboy because of his hat and swagger. The girls and I were new scientists with promising futures, attending a prestigious undergraduate conference in Missoula. We’d just met earlier that day in…
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ARTFUL ACADEMICS | By Brandy Renee McCann
Somewhere In Time: Writing The Imagined Future In November, the planet Pluto entered the sign of Aquarius and it will remain in that sign until 2043. I don’t want to write about astrology, but given the chaos of the last month, it’s worth mentioning as a thought experiment. Pluto (think underworld) is known as the…