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THE EXACT MOMENT I STOPPED TRUSTING GROWNUPS | Fiction by Peter Robbins
Grampa caught a perch with his bamboo pole, but it swallowed the hook too deep and he couldn’t twist it out. He reached into his pants for his pocketknife so he could cut open the belly, which Grampa said was the only thing a man could do in a situation like this, and he felt…
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SIGNS OF LIFE | Fiction by Braulio Fonseca
The breakfast rush at Dames Diner is dispersing. This Texas breakfast house is the epitome of Americana as sports memorabilia litter the walls. Texas pride is big and on full display. This is the type of diner that paints the true picture of the community in the same way a Walmart does on the 3rd…
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TWO TEENAGE GIRLS LAST SEEN LEAVING A FRIEND’S PARTY | Fiction by Pam Avoledo
We can’t find our daughters. We search with flashlights in the woods. We look with friends and cousins and strangers for a tennis shoe, a set of keys or pieces of denim in the twigs. We think it’s Liam from across the street. We know their friend Sophia knows something. We suspect strangers with their…
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HEAD WIND | Fiction by Noreen Graf
On the question about God, I could maybe do better. Tonight, like always, the old mastiff breathes heavy, unless I set the AC to 67. I’m cold and wide awake but I’m determined to rest in my bed, regardless of sleep coming or not. I wonder, once again, what quiet sounds like because my head…
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AFTER THE REQUIEM | Fiction by William McCarter
Death arrives at the most inconvenient of times. It came wearing ice like armor, shouldering in with no apology, no decency. Not a gentle passing in spring with lilacs in bloom, not some soft autumn twilight where the leaves could at least fall in sympathy, but a cruel, jagged winter. Piankashaw County looked more Arctic…
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PITCH CHRONICLES | Fiction by David Agyei-Yeboah
Mama always said that death had a way of creeping under you. It would showcase its claws before it hacked you to join it in the darkness. The night Afi died, everything changed. There were birds chirping in the air. Cold gnawed at thumbs and wrists. The rickety streetlights dimmed and the road remained a…
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BOLINAS | Fiction by Wilson Koewing
Delancey was somewhere over the Pacific destined for Tokyo. Ten days for work. Price was left alone with their two-year-old daughter and while she had scheduled two mornings with a sitter, he viewed it as a flaccid attempt to placate what she knew was his growing frustration with the frequency of her travels. He drove…
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RAVEN COMPLAINT | Fiction by Scott T. Hutchison
This past spring, a pair of mature ravens built a stick nest, in a half-dead oak tree crotch, back behind my house. The spot provided both cover and sight lines. They brought three rogues into eggy existence—noisy daredevils who learned how to fly and bomb around our rural neighborhood. We’re country, families occupying three or…
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WE’RE IN AN EMERGENCY | Fiction by E.A. Aymar
The murders quieted the town of Cromwell, Virginia, turned the storefronts into blank faces, the streets into empty, dreamless nights. Cromwell was typically a tourist destination this time of year, the weeks before Christmas. The town’s main street had been decorated to look like a holiday village, garland wrapped around streetlights, a group of carolers…
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TCHOUTACABOUFFA (LIFE ON A RIVER) | Fiction by Amelia Franz
Ashley gazed through the sliding glass doors, over the deck and back yard sloping down to the river. The Tchoutacabouffa was flooding from all the rain. Soon, it would lap at the cedar fence pickets, creep up the walls of the Little Tykes playhouse, with its bright blue roof and shutters. Until she heard him…