Posts filed under ‘Fiction’
Fiction: “Somebody’s Boy” by Diane Lechleitner
It was a sweltering day. August hot. Carpenter bees hovered in the still air. Flags hung limp and field crickets chirped in the tall dry grass. The boy was farther from home than he should be, more than a mile away, tromping through an unmowed hayfield. A small black dog ran alongside him, tongue drooping in the heat, burrs caught in his fur. (more…)
Fiction: “How We Play It” by Shelley Stack
We are in a small room in the attic of the church. Most of the time it is used for Bible study, but once a week it’s where the support group meets. We talk, we compare symptoms, we complain about drug reactions, we cry. Like each one of us at this meeting, Sandy has a tumor roosting in her head, tucked in the lining around her brain. She’s been here before, maybe ten or eleven times after her first craniotomy. She’s a mess because she has to have a second. The tumor grew back, bigger than before.
Sandy’s whole name is Sandra Dee. She says not too many people remember that there was once a Sandra Dee who was an actor, an ingenue, a movie star. Sandy is from the generation that knows that, not mine. She’s nervous. She rubs her temple. She fingers the bumps on her forehead. She massages the skin that covers titanium screws around the keyhole in her skull. I broke that habit. I tell her it will be okay. After all, she’s still here. She recovered once. She’ll recover again. At least this time, she knows what she is facing. Not like the first time. The first time, nobody knows what’s coming.
Fiction: “When We Are Gone the Light Is Alone” by Michael McCanne
The women departing slip of their chemises of light
All of a single sudden not a soul remains
When we are gone the light is alone
Paul Eluard
Predawn.
In the city, a factory burned.
Luisa paused, her brush frozen in the air, touching her lashes.
The transportation workers are out on strike; the freeways blockaded.
The capital will be cut off.
From up high, the city was unnaturally still.
She continued applying make up, noticing, perhaps for the second or third time, that the circle of lights around the mirror made tiny rings in her pupils.
Drinking coffee on the balcony, she watched the smoke rise in the distance against the ashen sky. She loved being in the apartment early in the morning when her husband was gone. It gave her sense of calm and readiness for the day. In their room, the bed was already made and her suit lay across the sheets.
Her husband had withdrawn a bundle of dollars, in case the peso devalued, and had put them in the freezer, inside a plastic bag. They never kept much money around the house and since he had left, three days prior, she found herself, again and again, in front of the open freezer, looking at those frozen bills.
Fiction: “Grace” by Jason M. Jones
Then turning to the spirit once again,
I said: “Francesca, what you suffer here
melts me to tears of pity and pain.But tell me: in the time of your sweetest sighs
by what appearances found love the way
to lure you to his perilous paradise?”-The Inferno, Dante, Canto V, Circle Two
I. Francesca
Paolo threw himself from the window last night, but it might have been the night before or the night before that. It might have been a hundred years ago, and it’s quite likely he’ll do it again tomorrow. Time means so little when the same monotonous moonbeams have streamed through these broken panes for years on end and all I see is night.
He returned inexplicably, and that’s what matters. I woke (who can say how long I slept?) and there he was, sitting across from me. We never share a word, but lacking that mad look, the snarling smile and arch of his brow, this room would lose meaning, the shadows wouldn’t take form, and our story would dissolve.
When I close my eyes, I can see his face—not Paolo’s, but a replica—a round, olive orb, curtained by twisting black locks, his brazen scowl as he crept the corridors before our death, his eyes like flames in the bedroom’s hearth. He clutches a long knife below the blade’s silver glint—his lips a demonic curl—and he springs through heavy wooden doors to catch us off guard.
Sneak Preview: “Against Elegy” by Adam Tavel
We know you’ve been waiting, and soon your patience be rewarded: The Winter 2011 issue is off to the printers and will be available very, very shortly! Watch out in the next couple of days for the release of the PDF on this website.
In the meantime, enjoy a sneak preview from the issue, the poem “Against Elegy” by Adam Tavel. We’ve posted it here.
Fiction: “I Thought I Was Going to Die” by Raphaela Weissman
i. In The Elevator
I heard a rumbling. I thought the other guy heard it too, the old man with the shopping bag, wearing a sweater vest and a hat that used to have some kind of special name when he was younger, before my time— fisherman’s cap. No, sandcatcher. Something like that.
It was a special rumbling. It’s always a special sound, when I think I’m going to die. I wanted to ask the old man, can’t you tell that there’s something different about that, that it’s coming from the bowels of the elevator shaft? He’s older than I am and has probably been riding elevators since they were made differently. Maybe rumbling louder than this was what an elevator ride used to sound like; maybe you were taking your life in your hands every time you set foot inside one of these, and they had a cute name for them, death boxes or the devil’s dumbwaiter. I’m just guessing. I would have asked him. It would have been the last thing I ever learned.
Fiction: “The Dead Men in the Bushes” by Lisa Burdige
There are dead men in the bushes, she thinks, right by where I walk the dog. Dead rich men killed by goblin boys. Thin, wiry boys, strung out on greed and miscellaneous wanga. Breath burned by that crazy smoke. Lips, cracked and dry, marked with tender pipe sores. Smelling a sweet, plumy scent like a cold shiver up your spine. (more…)
Fiction: “May the Road Rise Up to Meet You”
I sent my guinea pigs ahead of me with the friend of a friend. He was going to Portland and came to pick them up on Friday afternoon in a corroded green station wagon that was missing a fender. There was barely enough room in the trunk, on account of the mountains of old books, so we had to move half of them to the front seat. We wedged the cage between stacks of Kerouac and Faulkner because I wanted them to feel at home. “The next time we see each other,” I whispered to them before I shut the trunk, “you can tell me all about romanticism.” (more…)
Fiction: “Written on the Wall in Chalk” by Lee Oleson
A story of our post-9/11 Great Depression. This piece is an eery and all-too-telling portrait of today’s Americana. —The Editors
The laundry, off a side street, has a small sign over the front door that says Capeti & Brothers. It’s a large, two-story building with no windows. From inside comes the roar of machines. (more…)
Fiction: Bedtime Story by Robin Oliveira
In my half-sleep, I hear the tattling sounds of a key unlocking the front door, a tipsy stumble up the stairs, the soft hush of the bathroom door closing, and then the adolescent tell of muffled retching. I surface slowly from unconsciousness, exasperated but relieved that whatever escapade my daughter Caro has been up to this time hasn’t killed her. My foot searches the folds of sheet and blanket next to me, until I realize that the depression in the shape of my husband’s form is cool and empty.
