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How I Cured My Depression
Fiction by Bethany Browning The school nurse suggested I might have clinical depression, so naturally the first thing Momma did was take me to see her psychic [1]. “It’s a demon,” Miss Charlene said, too bluntly for my taste. “It lives in the upper right-hand corner of your bedroom,” She sucked a deep drag on […]
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Amen: The End of Men
Fiction by Owolusi Lucky I was born during harmattan, when sky in stinginess withheld its blessing, before first rain of the second year kissed earths dust, I was crawling about. They said the rain scared me. A lot scares me back then, like the man that wear shadows, and stayed in the dark, waiting for […]
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The Danger of Isolation
A Review of Sara Lippmann’s Lech By John Brantingham I downloaded Sara Lippmann’s new novel, Lech, on my Kindle immediately after having heard her at a reading in support of New Voices, a collection coming out in January by various poets and writers that hopes to reevaluate and reunderstand the Holocaust from a 21st century […]
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Finding the Line
Creative Nonfiction by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle There is a point when you have to let off the brakes for your own safety. Every action you must take is contrary to everything you’ve ever known about self-preservation. Careful can get you killed. Speed up when a branch blocks the path in order to hit it head-on. […]
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Blood Loss
Creative Nonfiction by Will McMillan Under the crackling strobe of grocery store fluorescents, I watched the blood as it slicked, as it gathered. Gruesome ribbons, like teardrops of scarlet, pooling into a flat, ivory platter of cracked Styrofoam. “REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE!” screamed the bright yellow sticker slapped across a fragment of damp cellophane, cocooning […]
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Betwixt and Between
By Karen Salyer McElmurray In my twenties and thirties, I traveled highways east and west. My 1967 Dodge Dart, its engine block cracked, took me from Kentucky to Arizona and back again. I road up the east coast to Maine, then far south to Key West. I kept a road atlas on the seat beside […]
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Spy Head
Fiction by M.E. Proctor When we started meeting in the pavilion on top of the dune, Billy was nine years old. Billy’s mom had called the office to tell me he wanted to talk to me. In private, in that place. It struck me as morbid, an unnecessary revisiting of a nightmare. But I’m a […]
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But You Still Have To Live With It
A Review of Scott Blackburn’s It Dies With You By Wiley Reiver Good crime novels are never really only about a crime. I’ll go further: Great crime novels aren’t even primarily about legal wrongdoing, its motivations and consequences for perpetrators and victims. The story of the impoverished St. Petersburg student with his borrowed axe and […]
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The Fractured Mirror: Winter Solstice, Christmas, and the Axes of Time
By Edward Karshner In the volumes written about the folklore of Christmas, what gets lost is that Christmas, like its cousin winter solstice holidays, is about the restructuring of time. We never really stop to consider that time, like folklore itself, is a construct orienting us to a world that seems, in the words of […]
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Plain People
Fiction by James Cato It wasn’t about her looks. She had lovely skin and a sugary smile and nice clothes. In fact, when she hired me to breed shrimp on her aquaponics farm half the boys in the town stopped speaking to me. Nobody knew her origins and myths circulated on where she was sleeping, […]