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Coming Home
Fiction by Melissa Llanes Brownlee The streetlights are puddles in ink as Kahea weaves her way home along the cracks in the sidewalk, their sodium orange glow weakly shining on the neighbors’ mango, avocado, tangerine, plumeria trees. She’d just gotten off the night shift at the Sack n Save with a few pau hana shots…
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Daytona
Fiction by Nathan Willis The cars stay bunched together. When they go by, I cover my ears. It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t bother the other people in the stands. They aren’t tourists like Harp and me. They understand the flags and strategies. They know the backstories of every team and every…
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Tired
Fiction by Stuart Watson I had been walking not quite an hour when I came to the truck. It sat on blocks. Four drums, no wheels. Or tires. A plywood sign rose from its bed. NEED TIRES That, I did. Just one, not like the truck. But was the sign referring to the truck, or…
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Point to Point
Fiction by Wilson Koewing Mike dropped Alison off at the Cypress Ranch Trailhead before dawn. There were no other cars in the parking lot. It was early October, and the peaks of the front range were lightly dusted with snow. She gazed at them, frosty and still in the distance and felt a lightness fall…
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Real Life
Fiction by Chris Milam Jennifer fills the spoon as I grab the syringe and lighter. This is how we make love now. We don’t fuck, we get fucked up. Been like this for two years. We’ve been together for two years and a month. We met at an NA meeting. Conversation over cheap coffee. Degenerates…
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… and title it, “Faith”
Fiction by Patricia Q. Bidar There’s a beach. Mexico. A young couple in a convertible, winding up a coast. A couple so attractive their grim mouths add to their allure. The man’s crucifix flashes in the sun. Introduce the players — not too many — in media res. There is me, in Philadelphia. At this…
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Sing With Me
Fiction by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez I approach the bar after my friends insist I go talk to the man nursing a beer and watching the screen above him. “He looks decent enough,” they said. I pursed my lips and arched my eyebrow. Decent enough—like I can’t do better. “You’ve done worse,” they said, reading my…
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Secrets of Small Engine Repairmen, or The Genealogy of the Crows
Fiction by Timothy Boudreau “A crow craps on your head one fucking time,” Brie’s brother Blake tells her, “and you’re not friends with them ever again.” It’s October, chilly, raw, gray, 1994. They’re sitting on lawn chairs inside a semi-circle of snowblowers, and the crows are cawing, the blue jays crying at the tips of…
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Lampyridae
Fiction by Erin Calabria Did you know, I begin, though I can’t be sure I’ve reached you: you, hunched over headlines that must be read twice. Morning sun stitching the grey in your hair, frail and fine as threads of spider silk. And maybe if I’d fallen in love with someone else, they would tell…
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Smokey the Bear Has the Matches
Fiction by Scott Gould TJ drove without lights on. His girl Treecie was all but in his lap, a hand wedged between her legs. Both of them all drunk up or stoned, her worse off than him, which could have been something to take advantage of, but she was relatively safe except for TJ’s finger…