by Robert B. Travis
There’s enough light in the desert to kill small rabbits and lizards. Their hearts pop. Their brains boil. The desert is fed up with light. It gets the purest, hottest light there is. It gets it and gets it...
by Jessica Myers-Schecter
For a few seconds Stella allowed herself to imagine it: herself in a new red dress, twirling before a seated Susan and a trio of mirrors. Stella putting a black skirt back on a hangar while Susan slipped into a blue version of the same item. The two of them snacking on a chicken salad at the Food Court afterwards, shopping bags by their sides. She glanced at the front of the restaurant at Susan, who was carefully folding a sage green tablecloth.
by Joey Brown
At 3:20am Auction Guy comes on John’s living room tv. John would never admit to Dorie why, but he likes Auction Guy, thinks he’s like a cartoon. He’s somebody’s grandpa, or at least wears somebody’s grandpa’s old checked suit. He...
by Wendi Berry
The guy with the orange jacket was still walking about the same time every day. Judith never knew when they might crash. It became a test. She had to stay close to the shoreline to avoid eye contact. She thought she might have to introduce herself he walked by so many times, but then the weather changed. The water darkened. The sand formed trenches. Judith climbed hills and trudged through ditches. If she weren’t careful she stepped into cold pools that suctioned around her feet. It got harder and harder to plod to the Sandy Dunes Hotel and back. She bought a windbreaker, a blue one because her gray sweatshirt no longer kept out the damp air. She wore suede Reebok walkers with fleece socks. She stopped seeing the guy with the orange jacket. It got too cold even for him, she supposed.
by John H. Tibbetts
It was exceedingly black out, black as deepest night, a menacing rain lashing the car. There were immeasurable depths in the woods, Alex thought. Staring into them was like standing in a small boat and looking down into the ocean. How far would you sink if you fell in?
by Emily J. Stinson
Willie could hear the crowd’s gasps, and as he looked around he saw people in shock—mothers bent down, pushing their children’s faces into their breasts, shielding their eyes and consoling them as they rocked back and forth on the balls of their feet, grown men standing with their hands over their mouths, teenage girls crying. It reminded Willie of the tent revivals that his mother had taken him to when he was a child, but here no one was being saved, no one was feeling the goodness of God. Here, everyone was in panic. Willie felt like he should pray, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to pray for.
by Gretchen McCullough
One day shortly before my finale, I dreamed I was at the circus in St. Petersburg. The ceiling is gilded with gold leaf, flecked with silver stars. No lions. No elephants. But acrobats soar through the air on trapezes. Their courage is breathtaking. Clowns are higher still, riding bicycles back and forth, as if they are tiny bees on a thin gold thread. At the same time, they are dropping sheets of blank paper into the vast net below. Are those my poems they are dropping into the air? Who will catch them?
by Matthew Cashion
That summer, Harold and his father slept together on the waterbed that took up the entire bedroom of the trailer Buddy had been renting since he split from his third wife, a woman Harold had never met. Above the waterbed he'd hung a vinyl painting of a naked woman lying on a bearskin rug.
by Jen Michalski
Although my 11-year-old neighbor, Joey Baron, had been skeptical of paying to break things he could break for free, I’d sold him on the breaking of them in the front room of our basement, which I’d cleared out mostly except for a ratty shag carpet and some old sofa pillows I’d pressed into the windowsill and other troublesome areas.
by Phillip Gardner
The night before Mardi Gras ended, Ken, who had been drinking mescal and snorting cocaine for three days, woke Richard at four in the morning. Richard heard the metal motel door open. The room was black dark. He could smell Ken, but he couldn’t see him. Ken was just a smell and a spooky mescal cocaine voice that sounded like wind and fire, like a hiss.
by Mark McBride
“I volunteered,” Dad admits. “Me and two other guys. We were a big circle of men in a clearing at the edge of a field. In the distance on a hill was a house with a stone fireplace. A road cut through the woods behind it. At the center of our circle were the snipers. They had smeared their faces with so much axle grease they were as black as spades. One wore glasses. They were on their knees and the sergeant told us which one to take. One of the snipers kept calling out, ‘Ich habe eine familie!’ I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I had an idea. ‘Ich habe eine familie, ’ he kept saying.”
“What does it mean?” Mitch asks.
“‘I have a family,’” Dad says. “He was the first to go down.
by Lee Dresselhaus
Tom approached Jackson Square carrying a milk carton and a box. He was dressed in one of Jason’s old mime costumes, which consisted of a set of one-piece body covering black tights, and he felt absolutely ridiculous. He felt nearly naked in the body stocking type outfit, and the absurd black derby perched on his head greatly increased his sense of humiliated unreality.
by Katherine Lieban
“We will stop at rest stops,” and here he pointed to a map, “in Huntsville and in Alma. Then we swing around Dallas on Highway 287 and you just better squeeze your legs together tight till we get to Wichita Falls. Now you kids see where we are? We are down in this corner of Texas – damn near Louisiana, and we have to go way up here, to Wichita Falls, which is damn near Oklahoma.” Mrs. Schroeder sat at the yellow formica table playing with the handle of her coffee cup. She winced every time he said damn.
by Brigitte N. McCray
“Ladies, ladies, you should’ve seen the mess,” Carl said of Dolly’s photographs and news clippings. He wore a black apron that read: “Creative Memories” in hot pink. “I walked into her house, and right there on her counter top were piles and piles of all of the pictures with two or three baskets filled and only one page in a book complete. Now Dolly’s always out at concerts and appearances. While we all might not be like Dolly, how many of us here are like her because we have our photos shoved here and there and everywhere? Now raise your hands.”
by Jessica D. Cox
When we got down to the river I looked at Annie. Her eyes reflected the blue off the water and I wanted to kiss her because the sun was bright on the river, tiny lights shining off the ripples like crystals and I’d kissed her before, but her face looked different that day and I could see she didn’t want to be kissed. Instead I asked if she wanted to swim.
