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If Wishes Were Fishes
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…
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Balaclava
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…
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Chamomile Tea, Undrunk
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…
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Ghost Heron
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…
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Redbud in the time of pandemic (Spring 2020)
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…
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Country Roads
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.…