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Real Life
Fiction by Chris Milam Jennifer fills the spoon as I grab the syringe and lighter. This is how we make love now. We don’t fuck, we get fucked up. Been like this for two years. We’ve been together for two years and a month. We met at an NA meeting. Conversation over cheap coffee. Degenerates…
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Outsider Perspectives: Home, Hinges, and Halcyons
by Mandira Pattnaik Before any of our reckoning happens, one must first assimilate. Consider “Home.” Feel about home, feel it under the skin, like the warm rush of blood. Home — the inspiration of poetry, the soil of longing, the destination of all return. Garden, hearth, dwelling, domicile. Ah! It evokes a whole gamut of…
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… and title it, “Faith”
Fiction by Patricia Q. Bidar There’s a beach. Mexico. A young couple in a convertible, winding up a coast. A couple so attractive their grim mouths add to their allure. The man’s crucifix flashes in the sun. Introduce the players — not too many — in media res. There is me, in Philadelphia. At this…
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Artful Academics: On Relational Confluence
by Brandy Renee McCann I’m at my desk in the basement of an old brick house on campus reading through transcripts of interviews with older adults. I focus on the text and ignore the Jacob Marley hiss and banging of heated air moving through the ancient pipes in the building. My work is listening for…
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Sing With Me
Fiction by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez I approach the bar after my friends insist I go talk to the man nursing a beer and watching the screen above him. “He looks decent enough,” they said. I pursed my lips and arched my eyebrow. Decent enough—like I can’t do better. “You’ve done worse,” they said, reading my…
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Tribulations of Rural Floridians
A review of The Patron Saint of Birds by Steve Lambert Reviewed by Vern Smith There’s a fair bit of journalism in Steve Lambert’s short fiction. By that, I mean he has real powers of observation when assessing the human condition of the denizens of Sahwoklee County. Or, put another way, he is keenly interested…
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The Pie Was a Final Draft: Scraps
by Michaella Thornton It’s a little before 5 a.m. and, instead of lying in bed and wondering why I cannot sleep, I get up. Maybe it’s my anxiety about Omicron and trying to keep my too-young-to-be-vaccinated child safe while navigating single-parent frugality (keep her home, but still pay preschool fees to keep her spot). Maybe…
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Secrets of Small Engine Repairmen, or The Genealogy of the Crows
Fiction by Timothy Boudreau “A crow craps on your head one fucking time,” Brie’s brother Blake tells her, “and you’re not friends with them ever again.” It’s October, chilly, raw, gray, 1994. They’re sitting on lawn chairs inside a semi-circle of snowblowers, and the crows are cawing, the blue jays crying at the tips of…
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Country Craft: In the Brickyard
by Stuart Phillips I have a pile of bricks. Actually, I have three piles, painstakingly excavated from the yard of my new house over the past six months. That was never my aim, but I couldn’t move a cluster of hosta next to the porch or level a space for a fire pit in the…
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Lampyridae
Fiction by Erin Calabria Did you know, I begin, though I can’t be sure I’ve reached you: you, hunched over headlines that must be read twice. Morning sun stitching the grey in your hair, frail and fine as threads of spider silk. And maybe if I’d fallen in love with someone else, they would tell…