Reckon Review

Tag: fiction

  • 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…

  • … 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Movie Time

    Fiction by Tom Weller The cool air of the theater settles into the Scrap Boys, hits their sunburned skin and sinks into their bones, banishes the heat of the summer, the sunlight and humidity they’ve absorbed wandering downtown streets. The harangues of shopkeepers, the too-cool stares of the high school boys leaning on their shit-box…

  • I am the Deafening Silence

    Fiction by Alyssa Bushell I am the abstract carpet with head-spinning lines off the elevator on the eighth floor. I am door after door that look the same, the first attempts replying to my key card with an obstinate red blink until one of them lets us in. I am the smell that wafts when…

  • Dance the Night Away

    Fiction by Bobby Mathews It was the kind of night on Bourbon Street when the heat comes down and smothers you like a jealous sibling holding a feather pillow. The shot girls were busy in their Daisy Dukes and bikini tops, hawking cheap liquor from expensive bottles. Drink the bottom-shelf tequila someone funneled into a…

  • Gold

    Fiction by Kate Faigen On the edge of town, there’s a gold wall that shimmers like sequins in the sun. Young people come in droves to take pictures in front of it. At the perfect time of day, like witching hour, they emerge—to dance, to shout, to strike poses they’ve perfected in front of mirrors.…