Reckon Review

Tag: fiction

  • COMMUNION | Fiction by Barrett Bowlin

    It is the winter of 1989, and you are ten years old, due soon at Ozarks Elementary for first bell, so your father wakes you like he normally does: by lifting you from your bed and placing you in the blue cloth La-Z-Boy, the one that perches in front of the family’s cabinet TV. For…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • PITCH CHRONICLES | Fiction by David Agyei-Yeboah

    Mama always said that death had a way of creeping under you. It would showcase its claws before it hacked you to join it in the darkness. The night Afi died, everything changed. There were birds chirping in the air. Cold gnawed at thumbs and wrists. The rickety streetlights dimmed and the road remained a…

  • BOLINAS | Fiction by Wilson Koewing

    Delancey was somewhere over the Pacific destined for Tokyo. Ten days for work. Price was left alone with their two-year-old daughter and while she had scheduled two mornings with a sitter, he viewed it as a flaccid attempt to placate what she knew was his growing frustration with the frequency of her travels. He drove…