Fiction - Year IV - Number 21 - February 2019

NO BETTER REASON THAN THISby Torrie Jay White The cabin smells like my grandfather as a young man. Like my mother’s skin in her last days. Like the gunpowder in my father’s pistol. Like the...

ALL OF NEPTUNE’S OCEANSby Rina Sclove Her hands are the only part of her that isn’t scarred.Everything else is marked, claimed, her skin varying shades of angry red and blistering purple, puckered and dry and...

GUILT MONOLOGUEby Don Dussault For me everything is in the present tense. Whatever whoever slips away into the past I yank it back. Here something of me thrives. And him. Too much of him. Straight...

JULIE IN CHICAGOby Eric Lutz Julie sat on her balcony. It was midday on a Wednesday. She wore khaki shorts, a lime green bikini top, and sunglasses. She drank Tecate and listened to Otis Redding...

THE GERMANby Rees Nielsen It was the summer of 1971 and Murrow and I were stuck in Tehran waiting for the weekly bus to Istanbul.   Down the hallway this barrel chested German was leaned up...

AMBIVALENCE: A LOVE STORYby Claudia Piepenburg October 20, 20166:00PM “Mrs. Williams? Alice Williams?” The doctor resists the urge to click his fingers an inch in front of the half-shut eyes of the woman sitting by the...

PLEASE CONFIRM YOU ARE NOT IN BEAST MODEby Anna Brassky A month ago, Chris began to see dwarfs, though not exactly see but rather sense their presence. Just as he was about to spot them,...

THE LITTLE DOGby Eric Massey There once was a little dog.  His name was Rex.  He lived in a small house in a small town.  He didn’t know what the town was called because, well,...

CANDIDby Michael Trobich Kate Gibbons likes to take pictures. She doesn’t know how it started, closing shutters and toggling flash, but she loves the way that each photo has every pixel in place and captures...

WHALE BONEby David Massey The young man accompanied me outside to enjoy the air and sun.  So balmy out here always in July.  We walked slowly toward this swing, my favorite place to watch the...