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Family Portrait
Fiction by Michael Bettendorf The portrait on the dusty mantle was of a family who didn’t own new cars and never would. Flannel-clad and wearing their good jeans, the family sat uncomfortably in a studio worth more than their house. They wore polyester smiles and were told if they worked hard enough, they could accomplish…
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Sweet Fruit
Creative Nonfiction by Karen Luke Jackson You ate that first one and its flesh was sweetLike thickened wine: summer’s blood was in itLeaving stains upon the tongue Seamus Heaney, “Blackberry-Picking” The summer my mother was five, she and her older brother Buck went blackberry picking. Working along a fence row, they filled a pail and a cup…
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Princess Visitation
Creative Nonfiction by Linda Parsons Digging in my drawer of ‘unmentionables,’ as ladies used to say, I thought an old camisole would work. Covid has taught me to make do or do without. I wasn’t about to lose my garden tomatoes to the birds’ swift strike, which opens them to wormy ruination. I had no…
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Gangrene
Fiction by Richard Holinger “Don’t go gangrene on me,” is what I tell the foot, but it has no common sense. It blames the black and smelly on me. “What you run into fenceposts for?” it asks. “Well maybe it jump out at me,” I answer because the snowmobile has got no radar. New powder…
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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…