Nate didn’t drink anymore. He told me out front in the driveway the reason he’d gone to jail was for four DUI’s. You do years for that many. “I was never any good at it,” he told me. “I had to keep finding that out.”… more
Category Archives: FICTION
Nails
FICTION by Derek PfefferHe wriggled the toes of one foot, then the other, making the little eyes that were his toenails blink in the darkness. Each of them a tropical blue, for his daughter had painted them the week before she’d died.… more
Were there darker provinces of night
FICTION by Evan James SheldonIt’s difficult to tell what the animals were before he began, maybe gray squirrels. I ask him what he’s doing but he only mumbles about things getting smaller and smaller. He waves me off with tufts of fur clumped to his blood-stained hand.… more
The Hardest Thing
FICTION by Tom MilaniOn Opening Day of the 2007 season, Del headed east in a Toyota Corolla stolen from long-term parking at McCarran International Airport. He had four hundred thousand dollars of Mob money in the trunk, a forged driver’s license, and his single prized possession: an October 22, 1960, issue of The New Yorker signed by John Updike and Ted Williams.… more
The Effigy
FICTION by Luca CampagnoliThe boy is not actually a boy, of course. It’s a metaphorical thing. He is too young to be the man and too old to be the child. It’s an arrested development.… more
No One’s Gonna Drag You Up
FICTION by Jeff ChonBrogan prayed Hailee wouldn’t take on his father’s moral and spiritual weakness, his step-mother’s willfulness, prayed she would someday find a man like Leonard, who would cure her of the modern world’s stupidity and cruelty.… more
The Hole
FICTION by Shelby RaebeckWhen his parents kicked him out of the house, saying they could not abide the path he had chosen, what had always been a hunch hardened into firm knowledge, the very idea of paths, of one thing leading to another, being nothing more than something folks concocted to make themselves feel better, nothing more than puffery.… more
Unnamed Storms
FICTION by Franz Jørgen NeumannHe knows she would never allow him into her life, but he dreams of her tripping into his: reveling in sloth on her days off, doing nothing but eating, napping, surfing the web, masturbating to porn, binging TV—the rewards for making it through another week’s shifts.… more
West
FICTION by Brett PuryearShe hoped that Jack might finally tell her something new, maybe even reveal some forthcoming thing, like a portent. A vision as terrifyingly clear as the western sun. But neither of them possessed a knack for seeing the future.… more
