Category: Fiction

Fiction: An Excerpt from Visions by Troy James Weaver

That day, the first day, she didn’t believe me, and it would be another ten years before she finally would—and then only after she was dead. I knew she’d be in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. She was cooking grits in a small pot, and had the radio turned up, listening to…
“Slumroom,” a story by Stephanie Jimenez

At his insistence, Marisa’s father accompanied her to the prospective apartment off Northern Boulevard. It was September, and on the way there, they got caught on a side street behind a school bus. They didn’t know the cause of the hold-up until they saw a veiled figure run down the sidewalk and up to the…
Excerpt: SITU, fiction by Steven Seidenberg

SITU is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text that occupies the interstices between diegetic, philosophical, and poetic discursive timbres. From this tension—which finds form in an indeterminate subject’s relationship with a bench, his anguished site of rest and motion—the subsequent flux at the center of the narrative voice facilitates a kind of epistemology of…
An Excerpt of Laura Catherine Brown’s Comic Novel Made by Mary

Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, daughters and motherhood. Unable to conceive and, because of her husband Joel’s youthful conviction for marijuana dealing, unable to adopt conventionally, Ann and Joel pinned their hope on Jessica, an unwed pregnant girl who offers them her baby.…
Fiction: “My Father’s Great Recession” by Alex Kudera

Fierce rains pour from black clouds, and when at last we meet in the parking lot, I see an obese and aged semblance of Dad. He wears a blonde mustache, but his receding topsoil is corn-silk white. Beige slacks and a light blue sweater do little to mask his immense roundness. Three hundred pounds or…
Fiction: “Abortion Clinic, 2021” by Beth Fiset

We wait in rows along the walls until one of our names is called and we reshuffle. We wait seated in chair clusters. We wait huddled over one another to sleep for hours on end because we can’t help ourselves, though, we want to be awake when they call so we are not skipped over…
“The Doctor Will See You Now,” a story by Kevin O Cuinn

When he opens his eyes, he’s back in the room, the one without doors, walls or mentionables. And a feeling that this isn’t new. Then a thought that this is old, which a) it is, and b) is worrying for the approximate duration of a sneeze. The path is hair, so much hair, the pretty…
Fiction: “Routine Cleaning” by Cate McGowan

Streetlights still gleam—their night-timers tick toward daybreak. You drive dawn’s early light, the rush-hour race. You park in a pot-holed lot, sit for a minute, delay entrance to your periodontist’s building, sigh at the drizzle, murky sky, construction cranes. Across the street, ambulances blurt horns as they enter a hospital breezeway. An empty freight train…
“Everybody’s Hurt,” flash fiction by Jill M. Talbot

Everybody’s Hurt “Can we do this outside, I want a cigarette.” “I heard that phone call, played it over and over, it sounded real—there’s a girl in real trouble, I thought—now just tell us what happened.” “Nothing happened.” “So you called 911 for fun?” “I didn’t say that, I said that I was confused.” “Are…