Author: Heavy Feather

“Election Night, Missouri, 2016,” a flash essay by Brad Aaron Modlin

All day, rats had bolted through my body. I spilt my coffee. I couldn’t hold a pen. To an old friend, a pre-Missouri one, I wrote: I wish we still lived in the same town, so I could bump into you on the sidewalk, and you would tell me everything will be okay. Come night,…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Cable Company” by Darkansas author Jarret Middleton

A barmaid closing up for the night stopped polishing a glass when a telegram dropped through the slot of the front door. She picked up the envelope marked “urgent” in red and unearthed a manila slip with a single typewritten line. “mechanism operational,” it read. “ascent at 0600. signed, the cable company.” The barmaid raised…
Five Poems by Esteban Rodríguez for Haunted Passages

Landscape with tree and leg Then you come across a tree,and hanging from its branch you find a leg—long, pale, severed cleanlyat the thigh. You walk beneath it, study the chain bolted to its knee, studythe way the sun—searing the edges off the leaves—cauterized its flesh.And even though its nails are broken, even though its…
Fiction: “The Lawn Jockey” by Dez Miller

I’d been thinking about that swimming hole for nearly half a year, since the middle of winter. I first saw it in a photo on Hunter’s dorm room bulletin board. The 4 x 6 had lanky Hunter poised midair, his arms and legs flung about dramatically, his mouth open in what I imagined to be…
“Attend the Way,” short fiction by Theodore Wheeler

It’s because he has a train to catch that Rodney leaves his room after suppertime. He puts on dress shoes and his green suit, the one that looks good against his skin. Earlier that afternoon, the big woman next door trimmed his hair. He lives in the Kellogg Rooming House, an old brick building near…
“Cthulhu Doesn’t Hate You” for Haunted Passages: Sean Oscar’s Critical Analysis of Apostle, the 2018 Netflix orginal film directed by Gareth Evans

Apostle follows Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) on the hunt for his sister, Jennifer (Elen Rhys). He is told that she has joined a religious community living on a remote Welsh island. The community practice a form of goddess worship, led by the self-declared prophet Malcolm Howe (Michael Sheen). Thomas, a former preacher who lost his…
The Dogs of Detroit, Brad Felver’s debut short story collection, reviewed by Michael A. Ferro

If ever there was a more convincing short story collection of America’s disheartening penchant for anger, violence, and grief, especially among these desperate modern times, I haven’t come across it. With The Dogs of Detroit, Brad Felver announces himself as the twenty-first century Midwestern heir apparent of Cormac McCarthy—a writer unafraid to expose the flawed,…
Three Poems by Jeremy Behreandt

A Third Place The bell tower prescribed an auditory space that corresponded to a particular notion of territoriality, one obsessed with mutual acquaintance. The bell reinforced divisions between an inside and an outside, as one might infer from the pejorative use of terms such as l’esprit du clocher. —Alain Corbin, Village Bells as with the…
While You Were Gone, a novel by Sybil Baker, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

While You Were Gone is a lovely read. It’s thoughtful, and deeply felt, and well-written, and structured with competence. It gently crosses a few genres: women’s fiction, Southern Gothic, literary homage, and what I indelicately think of as Dead/Dying Parent Lit. It balances between the three narrating consciousnesses of three sisters raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee,…