Category: Fiction

“The Sloth Girl,” a new fable by Ted Pelton

Sloth Girl lived at the top of a very tall tree in a great forest. Upon Sloth Girl lived Moth and his Wife as well as Beetle and his village and Algae who was many at the same time. Sloth Girl was hanging upside down in the top of the tree one day when Moth’s…
Short Story: “Rhizome” by Daniel Miller

OneYou exit the long or short corridor and enter a hexagonal room with a door on each wall. A room with paint on each wall, too, and the paint in this room is alloy orange. On each door, a numeral is printed in gold foil—two through nine. In the center of room is a table…
Sara Lippmann Fiction: “Runner’s Paradise”

I’m taking up running, I tell my husband at breakfast. My husband smiles though his juice. Adam is always running and he is always smiling an electric mouthful of fenced whites. He wears spandex shorts and neon shirts of breathable fabric. His man smell rises off of him, benign, like a tea: sweet grassy armpit.…
“Ruidoso, Carrizozo, Ruidoso”: Short Fiction by Adrian Van Young

Billy Sue Dolan was from Ruidoso, one town in a hundred New Mexico towns. Except Ruidoso was in Lincoln County, the most violent part of that desolate state, where William McCarty or William H. Bonney or Billy the Kid, he would come to be known for the twenty-one men he’d reportedly slain, had seen ideal…
Haunted Passages: “Sticking the Cow,” a lyrical prose piece by Stina French

My mother called penises “tallywackers.” That’s a name meant to scare a girl off ‘em. I wonder if that word came to mind when she was eighteen, when her uncle raped her. I didn’t understand, as someone who had never been raped, how it can make a woman run from her body forever, force her…
“The Arm,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Henry Giardina

I made my choice, and I don’t have no regrets so far. That’s a lot better than some folks in town can say. It’s been about, oh, four years now since they took the arm. Actually took it, I mean. I made the choice for it to go much earlier—I guess I must have been…
Fiction: “What Is Left” by Jen Michalski

You’re making good time. Keep this up, the splits will be amazing. There’s one guy ahead, a kid, really, who won’t even feel this tomorrow, the pain of achievement, his legs like spokes on a bicycle wheel, cycling, cycling, all legs and concave torso, a kid who hasn’t grown into form, into ache. You are…
Claire Polders: “Amsterdam,” a hybrid fiction

Aerial shot. The sun rises over a city of semicircles. Traffic noises are punctuated by shrieking gulls. The camera pans down, getting closer and closer to the earth until figures emerge on a street split in half by a misted canal. I – EconomyNothing is permanent except for the creation of junk. Bicycles. Umbrellas. Handbags…
Fiction by Claire Hopple: “A Catalogue of Leavings”

The situation really started to seem desperate after the death of a fake plant. Its fabric elephant ears were found shorn straight down the middle, fuzzy with the crosshatching of thread at the break. We knew maintaining a real one would be too much for either one of us, so this had seemed like a…