The first time I saw them, more than a decade ago now, they were standing in a circle behind the sun’s shadow.
The Bathroom | Kira Obolensky
It seems hard to believe that she, Darla, has met a Viscount through an online dating service, but he (his name she reminds herself is “Rupert”) has confirmed that yes, indeed, he does have a title. He did so with a self-deprecating shrug as if to say it was entirely out of his hands.
But There’s Music in the Trader Joe’s Parking Lot | Ali Littman
“There are a few starlings in there adding to the syncopation,” a woman said to me in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Her safari hat slipped down the back of her head. Her white hair flashed a beat of purple. Her zinc sunscreen beamed in patches next to her nose and beneath her ear lobe. A zucchini rested at the top of her grocery bag, which she lowered to the pavement, to slide her hat back over her head. She needed a proper look at the tree.
Freezer Burn | Eva Fitzsimons
When I was twenty years old, I left a kitchen knife in the baby’s crib. It was a good knife, that meat cleaver. I miss it. Nice and sharp. It would cut right through flesh and fat or gristle and bone without a lot of sawing. Movie night with the […]
My Name is Arnold | Wynne Hungerford
Beginnings I came into this world in 1947, Austria. My upbringing was typical of the time and place, although perhaps my parents were stricter than others because my father was the local chief of police. Whenever I disobeyed my parents, the consequence was always the same. I was forced to […]
Sprats | R. Sebastian Bennett
Tokyo, JAPAN – 1989 Lizzie and her cousin, Kate, were giggling like schoolgirls inside their room at Sanjo boarding house. I knocked on the door, softly at first, then louder—three virile raps. Lizzie opened the door. She was wearing pink pajama pants and a lacy T-shirt. “It’s the American.” She […]
Work Vacation | Joe Eichner
Things were changing around the office. We had to adapt, they said, to high velocity change in the marketplace. Rapid innovation was necessary. Customer experience paramount. Engaged employees a must. All of us a part of something, all of us human beings. They brought in a ping pong table. Put […]
Bull, Matador, Elvis, Mother | James Chrisman
1 A bull and a matador. Nobody mentioned the painting. No one even asked Virginia what trash heap he’d dug it out of. By the time I noticed it, I was on my second or third boilermaker. I’m more embarrassed saying this than you are hearing it, but the bull […]
Playing | Joseph Cardinale
I wasn’t getting anything done. And I was working all the time. At least I felt like I was working. Everything I was doing felt like something that someone else was telling me to do. But no one was telling me to do anything. And that meant the voice that […]
The Apartment Story | Justin DeCarlo
I woke up to a loud rapping at the door. It was my landlord again, looking for the rent. It was the middle of the month and he’d been at this for days. Every few hours he’d bang away, screaming his head off. I’d let him get it out of […]
People Who Look Like People I Know | Jane Pek
I am twenty-four years old and I have lived for less than fourteen days. I have never seen the woman I am about to meet but she knows me intimately. What am I? Apparently he enjoyed these kinds of riddles, which is to say I enjoy them, or I should; […]
Tied Up With String | Kate Tough
Another thing Sheridan has never gotten used to about Ross is his expressionless sex face. He’s almost soundless, too, but that’s par for the course: guys rarely make much noise except when a few beers have featured (uh-UH-I’m gonna co-o-ome!). The exception was the one who’d moaned and bucked like […]
The Sinkhole | Joyce Li
ONE The sinkhole appeared without warning one night, opening up at the end of our driveway as if to swallow us whole. Anderson and I bought the house—a run-down Victorian in upstate New York—in the hopes of restoring it ourselves, but the plain truth was that it was in even […]
Little Fishes | Michael Hawley
“Put you in the piss tank and flush you too!” Mandy. Five years old, half awake. She stands in the kitchen in her cloud-print PJs, curly brown hair bunched up on one side. Gramma Jean at the table lights a Kool. “What did she say?” “Piss tank,” says Pete by […]
Cristina | Taylor Larsen
There was something about Cristina that I liked right away. I was embarrassed to admit how quickly I calculated her looks and their probability of arousing my husband, but maybe such estimations were inevitable and instinctive. Sizing up Cristina was easy. She was chubby, with a pretty face, and wore […]
From the Archives: “This Is About the Radio” | CJ Hauser
“Sam realized there was a reason people went to dinner parties in twos. It was important to have someone there to squeeze your knee under the table when someone made an ass of himself and you couldn’t laugh out loud; it was particularly important if the ass was you.” A […]
From the Archives: “Brent, Bandit King” | Grayson Morley
Before you is a vast stretch of [Wasteland], a brown crust specked with defiant green. Warped skeletons of cars lie beside what passes for roads after the nuclear event. You take your first steps into the world. You have a [Pistol] in your hand: handmade, makeshift, of tubes and wood. […]
The Radical | Daniel Tovrov
Three times Bogdân Ŗžič has refused to debate me. I have challenged him in print and in several public forums, and tonight, I will challenge him again, in person, during the lecture he is giving at Columbia University, and I will make him confront his own traitorousness to the leftist […]
So The Pretty Roommate Dies | Ben Philippe
It happens. People die and their rent checks bounce. Not because their mortal records, checking accounts and all, are suddenly stricken from existence the moment the voltage overwhelms their hearts, but because they’re generally sloppy with money and that last check was always going to bounce anyway. Not to mention […]
No One to Miss | Travis Vick
She may remember how the air sounds, late in the morning, once a bird has stopped singing and gone away. She might consider her own stillness—or how the bedroom, in a way, has become empty. Her fingers, gathered together softly, are somewhat in the position of a hand holding a […]