Fiction - Year V - Number 30 - November 2019

THE STORY OF THE OLD MAN ON THE BENCH IN THE PARKby Harvey James I've gotta start from the beginning and so I say to him, I’ve gotta explain my dad. Well a few months...

SINKHOLEby Asa Noriega After the divorce, Claudia Frank bought one of those overstuffed couches where the pillows sink together like alternate directions of a life converging. In the mornings, she’d crumple into the cushions and...

FIFTIES SCOOPby John Tavares There are many gaps and holes in the story, but my origins in as few words as possible must necessarily leave some sense of vagueness and incompleteness. Besides, big parts of...

THURSDAY MORNINGTaylor Morrison  I knew something wasn't right the moment I walked into Mrs. Knickerbocker's class on Thursday morning. We called her Mrs. N. because of the silent K in her name. She felt it...

WINTER PEOPLEBy Barbara Borst Maria slumped onto the brown plaid sofa in her friend’s combination living room, dining area and kitchen. She was tired. Not from bathing and dressing Janet and changing her sheets and...

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDEby Jeannine A. Cook She was used to the flinching. The fiddling. The mess. The begging. The crying. The blood. These women with their thick thighs and thin thighs and saggy thighs...

THE ANNIVERSARYRenato Barucco He lies immobile under the sheets, arms at his sides and legs straight, like a corpse in a coffin but with eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. He woke up as...

A LIFE IN A DAYby Brighid Moret The screen door swung shut, slamming its frame as it did every day.  Eventually they are going to shatter the glass, Margaret thought as she assumed her daily position...

DIRECTORYby Amanda Corbin It had begun subtly: a renamed Olentangy here, a Charlotte moved twenty miles north there. At first, she faulted her brain as thought it labeled a rectangle a square. But as she...

CREATIVE DESTRUCTIONBy Mark Halpern … is the essential fact … Joseph Schumpeter, economist The 1980s were all boom, boom, boom. Even at the foreign companies, time raced along its money-greased track. And their guys on the scene—those...