The boy was directionless, and his flaws seemed so overwhelming, and the overwhelmingly troubling behaviors that Pink knew needed correcting, or at least addressed, in the boy, were myriad.… more
Category Archives: FICTION
First Snow
FICTION by Steve SaroffThere was a morning when I was seventeen and hungry that I first saw the ocean. It was in Oregon, on that road by the cliffs, and there was snow. The night before, it had been fog, and I had been given a ride by someone who was drunk. He was going fast, and we couldn’t see the road. I was asking him to stop, to let me out, but he kept saying, “What’s wrong? I can drive fine.”… more
Gecko
FICTION by James P. AustinJason remembered the cinch of his seat belt around his waist, the gasoline smell in the air, the sandlot across the street where two boys rolled a tire, laughing as they tried to keep it going. This is it, he thought. Those happy faces are the last image I’ll ever see.… more
The Colour Red
FICTION by Coraline Ismael KarimThe blood moon was something to marvel at. It was a divine presence like Death by your brother’s casket. A monarch butterfly flapped its wings by you, flew as if floating on the waves, the rise and fall of the salt air and water ebbing the creature towards its sanguine rose in the sky to pollinate.… more
Let A Sleeping Dog Lie
FICTION by X.C. AtkinsNate 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
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
