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...

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...

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...

WHAT DID YOU SEE?by Joel Worford It’s eleven P.M. and your hand is on your belt. You don’t see me. There are no streetlights in this neighborhood, so at first, you don’t see me. Or...

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,...

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 WALL BETWEEN USby John C. Weil  We walked with the wall between us, just as Robert Frost described.We picked up the stones, each of them still cold from the winter.I stopped a moment to...

THE VEIL OF JUDGMENTby Pauline Duchesneau The slam of the heavy steel door and the mechanized latching of innumerable locks dropped lead into my gut. I’d tried and failed to prepare for this moment. I...

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...