FICTION: “Night Creatures” by Patricia Meek

We’re parked in the middle of a snow-packed lane where treetops threaten telephone lines. Branches on both sides of the truck are knuckle-twisted and braided in ice. The headlights cushion my father’s draped body, but somewhere down the dark road, light, trees, and wire disappear. It’s midnight and Dad is taking pictures. He’s buried under […]

Fiction: “The Watch” by Nicholas LaRocca

After he was blown up, after he lost both legs below the knee, after he made it through three surgeries that saved his life, Jimmy Cachetti rotated out of Landstuhl and back to the states, where he convalesced near home, at the V.A. in Riviera Beach, Florida—a mammoth facility painted the color of an oxidized […]

Fiction: “The Note” by Delphine Hirsh

It had just started to rain when I ran into Theo’s parents on the street outside the museum. I was trying to hail a taxi. I was happy to see them and they seemed happy to see me. I was nervous that Theo’s mother Sally would scratch my face or that his father Reg would […]

Fiction: “Amateur Altruism” By Jody Azzouni

… okay you have to start over, that’s all. Huh? We’re at the beginning of the program again okay? Soup Kitchen: just start in on it like: here’s the big event that ended it, the event that no one talks about. I guess. Once upon a time—now it’s your turn: Go

Fiction: “Struggle” by Evan McMurry

Mikhail Feldman the writer disappeared from this world on June 19th, 1939—or, in the words of my grandfather, went poof. This happened on the street in Peredelkino, southwest of Moscow, in front of a café, though it seems strange to me to mark the spot of someone’s disappearance. It seems to me he could have […]

Fiction: “Opticon” by J.A. Bernstein

His company had been stationed on the Lebanon Line for four months, and in that time, they’d only seen “action” twice. The first was an unreported skirmish, late one, night when a forward party, crawling through thickets of scrub oak and sage, was greeted with a volley of shots—low, whipping tracers, which hadn’t touched a […]

Fiction: “Breathing Beneath the Water” by Adam Caldwell

1. The degree hung on the wall over a piano that Ted’s son Billy no longer played. Sage had bought Billy an electric guitar. An amp. Signed him up for summer indie rock camp. They were learning the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks. So now Billy went around the apartment singing “are teenage dreams so hard to […]

Fiction: “The Earth Falls to the Apple” by Saramanda Swigart

At word of Lord Thomas’s arrival, Ursula’s mother fanned herself with a napkin. Half-moons of sweat had gathered under her arms. Several weeks before, Lord Thomas had written that he’d be hunting in the area. Were Ursula’s fourteenth birthday feast to occur while he was there, he said, he’d make every effort to attend. He […]

Fiction: “Hanley’s Suggestion” by Todd Easton Mills

Recidivists! And I’m one of them— Killer-diller in my two-tone stompers. Hi-de-ho! We’re cooking with gas. It was a smoggy morning in August, already 120 degrees. In the quad below office workers were taking their 8:45 break. Hanley adjusted the binocular feature on his eyeglasses, which magnified the leaves of a live oak and revealed […]

Fiction: “The Nokken” by Sean McCarthy

“Papa!” Nina saw the old man first, just a second before Ollie, standing at the edge of the woods on the far side of the pond. He waved to them, and then beckoned, but they did not move. And then he was there, and then he was gone. The […]