#35: Fiction by Benjamin Murray
WALKING SUNSHINE This morning, my fiancée and I take Sunshine for a walk along the river. It’s a quick ten minutes from our apartment, crossing over a couple streets, before descending into the valley where the water’s surface gyrates. We follow her, admiring the sun and the contrails of passing jets. Sunshine struts and waddles […]
#34: Fiction by Maureen Foley
RECIPE FOR A HEALTHY MARRIAGE AFTER LOSING IT ALL White Audi station wagon cocoons me on the freeway. Autopilot to Santa Barbara at 70 miles per hour, no traffic. Infinite gaze of the blue Pacific Ocean in December. Nearly flat today, quiet ripples, small waves like my husband’s love. Seven years together and five years […]
#31: Fiction by Leyna Krow
DUST GIVES IN Mason followed his brother through the woods, asking questions he knew were irritating. “Why do octopuses need eight legs when squid get by with six?” “What happens to the tide during a lunar eclipse?” “Why do kids say ‘olly olly oxen free’ when it’s safe to come out from hide and seek? […]
#28: Fiction by Marco Etheridge
THE IMMEDIATE WITHIN You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I have a time bomb ticking in my head. I may seem like a normal person, but I’m a walking dead man. Most folks view death as an abstract idea, something that hovers on the horizon of a distant future. For me, death […]
#25: Fiction by Ben Tanzer
UNFOLDING “Get out!” You don’t hear it as much as sense it. It’s the movement, a shadow somewhere behind you, a fracture, and a puncturing of your world from that of a parallel and adjacent one. You are coasting down a sidewalk. You are filled with a kind of joy, contentment. Work is done. Freedom […]
#22: Fiction by Rebecca Ruth Gould
LIKE A CAVAFY POEM Their coming together was like a Cavafy poem. When they lay in each other’s arms, time compressed into space, and space condensed into time. Every anger, every resentment wrapped them more deeply into the folds of each other’s affections, like an old sweater that is more comfortable to wear than a […]
#17: Fiction by Pamela McFarland
SHORT I Mary watches Nonna move the antenna on the green plastic television back and forth. “I can’t get this damn thing to work,” Nonna says. The picture on the screen disappears into zigzags. “Watch your language, Ma.” Mommy points to Mary and frowns at Nonna. “Try adjusting the aluminum foil,” Mommy says when it […]
#14: Fiction by Bill Schillaci
UNDERCOVER I met Jesus outside the Café Au Go Go in the middle of Lenny Bruce’s last performance there, the one that would get him arrested for obscenity. I’d noticed Him near the rear wall, nursing a highball. He wore a Panama fedora pulled low, and when my eyes passed over Him, there was a […]
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#10: Fiction by Jeff Houlahan
STILL IN VAUDEVILLE The ideas came all the time. It made talking to people hard. The only thing he could control was how much attention he paid, but he liked to pay a lot of attention because sometimes the ideas were very good. He had read somewhere about a retired jockey who opened a bar […]