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LIFE CYCLE OF A DOMESTIC FIREFLY | Fiction by Chelsea Stickle
“There used to be more fireflies when I was a little girl,” Mom tells me. “I used to catch them, just like you.” At this she boops my nose. My repurposed Peter Pan peanut butter jar winks neon yellow-green from the fireflies I caught before dinner. When I was really little, Mom used to come…
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THIS IS MY FLOOR | Fiction by Curtis C. Morgan
In February of 1974, my wife and I bought a hundred-year-old farmhouse in northern Pennsylvania for $22,900. Working with my hands was not something I was accustomed to doing. By the time we left, four years later, I had built almost everything in it. The house sat on Ranch Road, on Hanlon Hill, in the…
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AS IT SHATTERS | Fiction by Keith Woodruff
When the trophy hits the quarry rocks far below, she imagines the golfer’s tiny gold head flying, the toothpick-thin golf club spinning away, broken off hands still gripping the shaft. She wishes there were some magical voodoo correspondence between his body and all these shatterings. That while sitting around the conference table with the entourage…
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WHAT WE LOST IN THE FIRE | Fiction by Lori Sambol Brody
Five days into the Sunset Fire evacuation, Pete and I sit on the deck of our crooked little house on the hillside drinking Tecate and eating packaged meals from World Central Kitchen. In the background, the generator chugs a steady refrain because the electricity was turned off even before the evacuation order. Ash clings to…
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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…