Reckon Review

Category: Fiction

  • Eulogy

    Fiction by Stephen J. Golds The old man always liked to say he’d outlive me. He was wrong about that. Wrong about a lot of things as so many fathers are inclined to be. My sister, she was the one called me to let me know. Her voice sounding like a foreign language down the…

  • Codependency (Animals Included)

    Flash Fiction by Anna Schachner My sister has a pair of fake alligator boots that come up to her thighs. Tonight, on pills, she is only a little high—thigh high, she says—and asks for them. I pull them from her closet and hold them out to her.  “No, you,” she says, flopping her head against…

  • A Glamorous Life

    Flash Fiction by Katy Goforth I was born old. My mama and daddy had been busy before me and stayed busy after me. I was number four of thirteen. Lucky in some ways. I got marked as Lettie. Number ten got left with Tibb. And, well, the last one just got saddled with the nickname…

  • Part of the Business

    Fiction by Travis Cravey Tommy had been going over invoices for two hours. His computer was getting warm and the heat made Tommy’s little office hot. His desk was just piles of paper and a keyboard, save one picture taped to his monitor of Tommy’s sister Katy and her baby. The picture was old now,…

  • Two Innocents

    Fiction by Elizabeth Walztoni Casey Fried’s grandfather had often told her that she was one of God’s honest children. He never would explain what it meant, to be one, but said the fact she could not understand was proof of it. She still thought about it wherever she went. God’s honest child has clocked in…

  • Mama Bear, Protect the Herd

    Flash Fiction by Annie Frazier The first coral snake I ever killed snuck up. There I was in the pony’s half-cleaned stall, leaning sweaty against the pitchfork handle, answering a text. Up it rose from under the stall mat where it had laid coiled between packed red clay and black rubber. Silent. Shocking red. Cohabitating…

  • When your mom is a wind-up doll

    Fiction by Brittany Terwilliger Pull the string once and she drinks half a bottle of Grey Goose.  You’re just having fun. Sunday brunch at that old garage with the rhubarb pancakes, the summertime corn fields as high as your head, you get that happy shimmer a person could float in forever. The craft cocktails are…

  • Exodus

    fiction by Jamie Etheridge The marks are high up on the inside of her left arm where no one is likely to see them. I see them. Pink striations. They are jagged and furrow across pale, tender skin. She sits in detention with Julia or Kim or both of the North boys, neither of whom…

  • Dumpster Cats

    Fiction by Kyle Seibel Gang all at the bar in their suits and ties and dresses and clacky shoes. Coming from Carter’s sentencing is why so fancy. Gemma, Carter’s most recent whatever, openly sobs. Six months, she says. No one knows what to say to that. Why Carter got six months is because he was…

  • Frost Tender

    Fiction by Amanda Baldeneaux Autumn loosens everything. The cattails come uncorseted by late September. Hard wind unties the binding of seedpods for spreading. But just before the wind chill dips below freezing and the killing frosts come, the flowers in Crystal’s garden still bloom. Crystal only leased the lot of land from a neighbor, but…