Fiction
December Contributors
Richard Alured, Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi, Arthur Aronstein, Jennifer Benningfield, Andrew Rai Berzins, Ace Boggess, Courtney Burten, Kayla Cain, Luanne Castle, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Tulip Chowdhury, Megan Chunn, Ben Connell, Kyle Cox, Jake Creps, Roger D’Agostin, Harry Del Monaco, K. Uwe Dunn, Zary Fekete, Ryan Frye, Steve Gerson, Benjamin Goluboff, Katie Goto-Švić, Richard Grayson, Dee P. R. Kay, Joe Kilgore, Hank Kirton, James A. Knight, Nolan Knight, Alejandro Gabriel Leopardi, Lior Locher, River Lucero, Mark Luebbers, Lindsey Maple, Shrutidhora P Mohor, Guinevere Ngozi Morgen, Faith Murri, Joseph Quilindrino Niduazu, Mika Nadolsky, Susan Brink O’Flaherty, Steve Oehmen, Seth Parker, Randall Perry, Timothy Petkovic, Rachel Racette, Arjun Razdan, L.G. Reed, Nicolas Rivera, Hil Schmidt, Gahl Shattan, Sumitra Singam, Melvin Sterne, Elizabeth Sundstrom, Amir Szuster, Jack Uppling, Derek Waulet, Walter Weinschenk, CR Widen, Jacob Wrich, Brandon Yu, Dodge Zelko, Kit Zimmerman
December Highlights
the last supper
by Jayson Carcione
“Soon the Manhattan skyline will be invisible behind a veil of white…His wife places her open palm against the glass of the window. She thinks everything is beautiful in the snow.”
close to me
by Alison L. Fraser
“The stench is emanating from inside Arlo’s locker as we pass it on our way to lunch. I glance towards it, and she notices me.”
going my way
by Kenneth M. Kapp
“Dead and gone. I’m getting colder. No pain though.”
scarecrow
by Robert L. Penick
“Soldiers found him on his back, eyes staring through the broken ceiling at blue sky, as white doves flitted, freely, from rafter to rafter.”
the juggler
by Jacob Wrich
“Over and over, he drops the balls, each time only able to juggle briefly before he drops them. The vultures encompass him in a broad circle, hopping and spreading their wings.”
“go, bearcats!”
by Johnny Byutorie
“‘Holy shit! Did you see that kid kill Joey!? What the actual fuck fire head emoji’
‘It was an accident! They were trying to help; don’t blame the kids, blame whoever installed faulty junk into our school red angry face emoji’
‘Those poor kids must be traumatized angel baby emoji’”
conversations with god
by Mark Daniel Taylor
“The murderer is lost, directionless—he will be looking for guidance…He’s not asking God who to kill next, he’s asking for redemption.”
notes regarding a roundtable discussion
by Joshua David Bellin
“If our practices are guided by rationality and theirs (seemingly) by magic, who can say at what point the former might not have evolved from the latter? Who, indeed, can claim a monopoly on reason?”
minds chase, chances run
by Samantha Szumloz
“After three slaps, specks of blood eject out of his mouth, splattering onto my collarbone. His body goes limp. Alarms blare in every part of me.”
in the name of justice
by Kim Farleigh
“Describing unprovoked attacks as preventive actions constituted “justice,” enabling the powerful to override intra-suburb law…“The bastards do whatever they fucking well like and call it whatever they fucking well want!”
old road 9
by M. G. Mclaughlin
“Her fingers cramped from the frantic pushing of buttons and tapping of light pulses. She rubbed them. She looked down at her hands. Hands that mixed water and cold air like Mother Nature to kill.”
after i got stuck in the record
by Mattia Ravasi
“After I got stuck in the record I crash-landed in a dark, raging ocean. I had no idea where I was, nor how far the water stretched around me.”
what we don’t see
by Alejandro Gabriel Leopardi
“Someone who wants to be accepted as anything but what they are perceived to be, must open themselves up freely. That never happened. She didn’t want it to.”
time mutant
by Peter Harris
“It was never a range conspirators who were in control, he realized. The puppet master pulling the strings was always the vast, omniscient presence of time.”
it’s okay
by Willow Nichols
“I hear a clock ticking but have no idea how much time is passing while I lay trapped in this human refrigerator.”
foreclosure
by Matthew O’Brien
“The layoff and divorce combined to form a fault line in his once rock-solid confidence.”
love & poison
by Cleve Lamison
“A final act of devotion. I fingered her trigger until she climaxed a third time…It was explosive.”
draconian error handling
by Cristiano Cardone
“The phalluses wrapped around me, and I was dragged under the block, dissolving. In the end, I was a big hypocrite, trying to escape from what I was breathing and living.”
the annunciation of appalachia mary
by Allister Nelson
“God comes hungry to your table. The crops have rotted. Tins of bean, ash in the cornbread. He asks you for food.”
in the addict colony
by Neil Randall
“We have a 0.0% success rate at present, and of that we are immensely proud.”