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Squirrel Hunting
Fiction by Francois Bereaud On an October morning in the last fall of his life, Art sits on his porch, a cup of coffee fortified with a half shot of whiskey in one hand – fuck you cancer – and his pellet gun in the other. Art’s not a stoic about his condition. He’s angry,…
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Cleaning House
Fiction by Kim Steutermann Rogers Across town, a large hole is being dug to contain your grief, the headline read. Come by at dawn, dump your troubles, start a new day. The first day, Jen offloaded her ex’s favorite coffee mug, the stained one with a big blue “M,” the logo of his college alma…
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Orphans
Fiction by Jamy Bond On clear nights we snuck through the window of the bunk house and made our way to the creek to skip rocks and soak our feet. There was something about the cool air, the sable sky, the moon’s vibrant bloom that made our crime worth its potential punishment. If Mr. Brody…
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Every Which Way, the Wind
Fiction by Pat Foran My Dear Frontal Passage Friend, We’re having trouble hearing each other. Is it windy where you are? Is it raining, Gene Kelly raining, where you are? Is there a fire in the back of your head, burning from the back to the front, perpetually? Is it like falling falling falling without…
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Three Deer Yesterday While Driving
Fiction by Donald Ryan Headlights interrupted the young buck’s breakfast. With his head alert and body frozen, his close-cropped, sprouting points were as clear as a positive afterimage on the first blink. As the road veered, the beams, straight with the car’s speed of light, yielded the trance. He thawed. Another blink. He was gone,…
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If a tree starts crying for help in the middle of a forest, but it’s at a frequency too high for human ears to hear, did it really cry?
Fiction by Kirsten Reneau Yes, because we can actually see the acid tears that the roots secrete up through the soil, slicing their way through the hard dirt, physical markers of the call for help. Yes, because it is very likely people who are making the tree cry – well, the people or maybe termites…
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Beauty in the Bones
An excerpt from In the Lonely Backwater Fiction by Valerie Nieman The kitchen at the Plantation wasn’t anything like the rest of the house. No displays of artificial flowers or gold-painted Valentine cupids holding up lamps, no bright-colored couches or polished furniture. It was a working place, my grandmother’s office. We had moved back from…
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Crows in the Barleyfield
Fiction by C.W. Blackwell Adelia hides in the tall barley and watches the old man pace at the edge of the field. He looks lost and unsteady on his feet, sunlight glinting from his thick drugstore eyeglasses. He shouts her name with his hands laced atop his head as if the pose could somehow carry…
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Extraction
Fiction by Beth Gilstrap Novella had a tooth extraction and thought she’d be fine to drive herself home, but the gas was more palpable than she expected. It wore off enough to make the throbbing in her right cheek crawl down into her neck. Her hands felt dead. She plopped one on top of the…
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I Have This Thing About Being Wrong
Fiction by George Singleton My neighbor couldn’t put a four-piece puzzle of Florida together, but he’d been likable. We never talked politics or religion, or history, literature, television shows that don’t involve a laugh-track, music, baseball, health insurance, how America is supposed to be welcoming to immigrants. Reese’s the weatherman, six and eleven, for one…