Fiction
June Contributors
Holly Baldwin, Cooper Clarence, Yaron Dotan, Patrick Johnston, JB Malory, Joanne Merriam, Janna Miller, Robert John Miller, Pavle Radonić, Grace Raidan, Nayt Rundquist, Shahrzad Warkentin, Holly Woodward, and Jensen Young
May Highlights
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back in the city
Fiction by Brian Washines
“I took the radio out onto the balcony and tossed it. When it hit the parking lot it went into what appeared to be three separate pieces. Someone in one of the other apartments across the street laughed.”
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flowers
Micro-fiction by X.C. Atkins
“I’d dump them into the lake just out of town, as usual. I sawed them into manageable pieces, listening to the Cocteau Twins.”
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we dance the hula at the hotel luau
Micro-fiction by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
“and we dance the hula and we dance the hula and we don’t tell our stories not the ones you want to know…”
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and then there is nothing
Fiction by Daniel Sheen
“‘I’m scared,’ I whisper, my voice trembling as the first celestial streak appears from over the horizon…can still see their polished brightness reflected in his black-water eyes. Painfully beautiful. The boiling sky veined with the fiery tails of a dozen artificial comets.”
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long and behold
Fiction by Catherine Dean
“Let’s just say that if Plato’s Republic contained a perfect form for a bad mother, you might be it…A classic filiophage, like in Medea, like in The Brood. At least Medea knew how to create a beautiful table.”
hopeful ash
by CR Widen
“There is a haze over our community- not just the smoke, mind you, but spiritual, a malaise, a sickness. We are missing something fundamental, or perhaps there is a wound we cannot see…”
god’s watch
by Harry Del Monaco
“Legend has it, when the watch stops ticking, the world stops.”
dinner party
by Jacob Wrich
“Kong is, in fact, the Christ figure. We misunderstand his attempts to save Ann Darrow, the beautiful symbol of mankind’s lost innocence. And because we don’t understand him and his quest to save humanity, we must kill him.”
pestle and mortar
by James A. Knight
“Steven Porter was found dead in an alleyway, during the winter of 2012. He fell from a window of his fourth-floor town house in Kilburn. The fall shattered his skull, leaving a lake of blood. The red lake was covered in a light dusting of snow.”
charles ricard (c.r.) travels east
by Arjun Razdan
“There is only one Time, and this Montre is its Prophet.”
false waters
by Nana T. Baffour-Awuah
“That day, as I laid my best friend to rest, I buried his God too. And I found mine.”
out/in
by Jennifer Benningfield
“When I die, I just hope someone worth a damn gives a damn.”
the easiest job i ever had
by Melvin Sterne
“I deduce from this that he was not popular in high school or especially good at sports – all traits that channel people into police work like here at the agency.”
a tourist in green
by Brandon Yu
“Some of them take severed ears, scalps, and thumbs from dead VC and make necklaces out of them, which—even I have to admit—is a little tacky.”
the collaboration
by Arthur Aronstein
“There were giant marble vulvas, impressionist fungal stalks with colorful throbbing veins, clitorises crafted with coils and still-life circumcisions. Patrons surveyed these works with hands over their children’s eyes, jaws slack, none stopping to look at the painstaking detail invested in each one.”
zone of avoidance
by River Lucero
“And anticipation together, like sharing blood and breath together and shimmering in your chests together and BOOM! And BOOM!”
all the kooks
by Ace Boggess
“The fight started right in front of her in the pasta aisle. Mary Ellen wasn’t close enough to hear if words had been exchanged…Everything was political, even the act of picking out linguini.”
living water
by Zary Fekete
“He calls the future water alive. She looks down at the rope-burned rim of her jar and thinks, Alive isn’t always the same as easy.”
elena
by Alejandro Gabriel Leopardi
“Elena’s gone, and she’s not coming back…She left a clear reminder that happy people aren’t happy. Not all the time.”
the day she swallowed glass
by Ronita Chattopadhyay
“She was done with being quiet and submissive. “I will become tough,” she said out loud. She gulped down the remaining water. And then she noticed it – a crack at the bottom of the glass.”
the pain master
by Lior Locher
“Neutral face, clean-shaven. Eyebrows neat, hair lined up like a platoon. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. You both know the deal.”
sammy
by Jake Creps
“It’s been 25 years since I took Sammy’s life but only 6 days since I understood why. Maybe not why but how. The story I told everyone was a lie.”
caliwashigon
by L.G. Reed
“The coffee shop looked different as Rob Winkle approached it after a restful nap…Was this a dream? Maybe he was still on the couch, asleep.
effort
by Mika Nadolsky
“I love you!” Gem shouts, and she is running. “I want to be you, ingest you, consume your blood and piss! I want your mind and body, and I want to feel it on me like my own flesh!”
the tube
by Richard Alured
“It all started about a week before when I’d stumbled from bed and down to the kitchen and discovered a scene of great negligence: five empty beer cans on the floor, crushed at their centre, dregs refracting on the linoleum, wildness.”