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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…
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Smokey the Bear Has the Matches
Fiction by Scott Gould TJ drove without lights on. His girl Treecie was all but in his lap, a hand wedged between her legs. Both of them all drunk up or stoned, her worse off than him, which could have been something to take advantage of, but she was relatively safe except for TJ’s finger…
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Movie Time
Fiction by Tom Weller The cool air of the theater settles into the Scrap Boys, hits their sunburned skin and sinks into their bones, banishes the heat of the summer, the sunlight and humidity they’ve absorbed wandering downtown streets. The harangues of shopkeepers, the too-cool stares of the high school boys leaning on their shit-box…
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I am the Deafening Silence
Fiction by Alyssa Bushell I am the abstract carpet with head-spinning lines off the elevator on the eighth floor. I am door after door that look the same, the first attempts replying to my key card with an obstinate red blink until one of them lets us in. I am the smell that wafts when…
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The Theseus Paradox for Exhausted Parents
Creative Nonfiction by Shannon Frost Greenstein 1. Imagine you have a steaming hot cup of coffee first thing in the morning. You drink the first sip and hail Jesus. Before you can take a second, Child #1 needs juice and Child #2 is walloping Child #1 for whining about juice. You put down the coffee,…
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Dance the Night Away
Fiction by Bobby Mathews It was the kind of night on Bourbon Street when the heat comes down and smothers you like a jealous sibling holding a feather pillow. The shot girls were busy in their Daisy Dukes and bikini tops, hawking cheap liquor from expensive bottles. Drink the bottom-shelf tequila someone funneled into a…
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Gold
Fiction by Kate Faigen On the edge of town, there’s a gold wall that shimmers like sequins in the sun. Young people come in droves to take pictures in front of it. At the perfect time of day, like witching hour, they emerge—to dance, to shout, to strike poses they’ve perfected in front of mirrors.…
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Just Like Those Killing Floor Blues
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…
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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.…