Tag: Fiction

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…
Fiction: “The Drip Drop” by Rita Bullwinkel

Behind Gosling’s house there is a giant black ball of goop that hovers above the ground. It drops on his cat and creates puddles that we have to sweep away in the winter so they don’t freeze. When Gosling goes on vacation and the backyard is left unattended leaves blow under the ball and mix…
Fiction-screenplay Hybrid: “Game in the Sand” by Joe Sacksteder

GAME IN THE SAND They have finished securing Karl to the hood of the Chevy using the collected belts of everyone involved in production. Karl is unsure of many things. If his reflection will be visible in the windshield. If it will be obvious how slowly they’re driving the truck. If he can slip through…
“An Instrument,” fiction by Luke Wiget

It doesn’t matter anymore because organ music has gone the way of, well, organ music. But I remember when I was a kid someone stole the pipes to the Presbyterian Church’s organ to sell as scrap metal. There were two men. Both were wearing coveralls so the church secretary trusted them. The workmen told her…
“Christopher Ke’alohapauole Akana: A Life,” fiction by Jonathan Callahan

When I first set out to write the Life, I was twenty-six years old, my subject at the time therefore just approaching the twenty-seventh anniversary of his expulsion from the womb. Yet nearly four fruitless years had passed by the time I intend to revisit in these notes; I was now twenty-nine, and had arrived…
“Republican Jesus and Real Jesus Meet at the Endeavor Diner,” fiction by Ron Burch

Republican Jesus says, “So I say to you, Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. Unless you’re poor or an immigrant or you look dirty.” Then he says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole…