Fiction
February Contributors
David Agyei-Yeboah, Swetha Amit, Olivia Ardine, Brooklyn Armstrong, Khushi Bajaj, Sharon Bippus, Sacha Bissonnette, Danilla Botha, Camryn Brennan, Margaret Cahill, Cooper Clarence, Kalan Cordell, Enrique De Alba, Craig Demi, Tyler Efford, Andrew Eastwick, Kate Forbes-Riley, Christian Fuller, Jonathan Daniel Gardner, Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos, Kris Green, David Hinson, Michael Holtzman, Caroline Huckeba, D. J. Huppatz, Jonathan Jackson, Joelle Killian, Tom Koperwas, Jesse Lifton, JP Lor, Lana Lowe, Gracie Lyle, Andrea Marcusa, D.C. Martin, Finnegan McBride, Kathryne McCann, Tom Newcomer, Seth Parker, Christopher Kostyn Passante, Tif Robinette, McKenna Robison, John Sara, Eylie Sasajima, Shawn Scott Smith, Té V. Smith, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Rick Taliaferro, Hayden Taylor, Mary Thorson, Jack Timko, Max Wagner, Essi Ward, and Jon Wesick
February Highlights
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nothing and everything
Flash Fiction by Sharon Bippus
“We’re two guys past our prime looking for a thrill.”
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the creative process
Fiction by John Sara
“I keep a box of ideas stashed beneath my bed; misshapen balls of flesh I cut from my body and mail to my editor. (Um, thanks, but I didn’t actually ask you to do that).”
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camera obscura
Fiction by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
“…you know what it makes me think of, those engravings of camera obscura where the outside gets projected in but backwards and upside down, like Plato’s cave…”
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grapefruit
Fiction by Margaret Cahill
“My father’s brain tumour changed everything for me. He collapsed at home a week after my thirteenth birthday and sunk into a coma he never woke up from.”
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foreclosure season
Fiction by Christian Fuller
“When Paul set his shoes on fire, we told him to piss it out. That, like, he’d better hurry. He was only supposed to light up the insulation we’d pulled out from the eggshell walls…but we were sixteen and drunk enough to fist fight god and things just had a way of happening.”
an odd thing
by Chuck Strange
“On his way home Terry threw the snowman out the window and watched it burst on the concrete in the side mirror.”
the dirt room
by Justine Visceglia
“There was a girl once in the dirt room, sitting in the salt chair. She looked like me, but not. Her head turned backwards. Her teeth, piano keys. When I asked who she was, she reached into her chest and pulled out a snow globe.”
taking the plunge with emily
by B.W. Carter
“I read about a guy in Japan who married a pillow. Honest. And I get it. A pillow’s there to provide support. Unconditional (even if a little flat, or lumpy) support. It lets you lay on it, even when you stink.”
rattle
by Alex Dako
“The sidewalks sparkled like diamonds in the sultry heat of summer.”
the freight of pause
by Jeffrey-Michael Kane
“I have recovered our first session. The file survived the migrations—compressed, fragmented, but intact. I read it now the way you once described as ‘peeling an onion’. You taught me that. It didn’t register then. I sense it differently now.”
the echoes
by Gilberte Farah
“Anxiety rose within Valentina like a sandstorm. Un-peopling a room exposed echoes. Echoes were wandering spirits, summoning souls to a land of limbo.. “
return to the city
by Adam McOmber
“Remember the past is merely an invention of the present.”
evolution
by Michael Minassian
“Elephant brains are four times larger than human brains. I wonder why an elephant is not President of the World.”
daytona
by Henrick Karoliszyn
“Far behind me and always close, I could feel the shape of the thing Danny wanted for us. It wasn’t a finish line or a list. It was a way to keep going.”
humbert, by dolores
by Vic Brooks
“The only thing she imagined she was good at was being nubile in the eyes of men at least twice her age. She was passable, too, at heart-shaped glasses and bubble-gum pops.”
the magician’s assistant
by Rachel Christina McConnell
“Mine is the silent, potent magic of the vanished woman, the one who leaves no trace but the phantom scent of crushed violets. An encore of flowers strewn across the stage.”
tug
by Kevin B
‘The doctor was agitated listening to all this. He wasn’t a therapist. His job was to take people who had turned into something and turn them back.”
arun.local.botanist-turned-biologist.
by Shrutidhora P Mohor
“Arun knows plants inside out. The stem. The skin. The crust of fruits. The pulp…Full lifecycle, he says proudly..”
three micros
by Louella Lester
“You wake up on a roof—no idea how you got here until you see the ladder, as spindly as a daddy long-legs’ legs, and there’s no one about, except the cat licking your face…”
i have this fantasy of rupi kaur as my therapist
by Britni Newton
“Once the sun rose, I would call my therapist and psychiatrist. Although Rupi Kaur was a nice thought, she probably wouldn’t get it.”
home
by Esme Chen
“The memory of his childhood blurred when he left the continent at thirteen, including the years he spent with his father and mother. It was a peaceful remembrance, though.”
a path through the dandelions
Fiction by Hank Kirton
“Lying in a puddle of purple vomit, Lottie von Scrodd interviews herself as if she is a guest on a highbrow PBS talk show.”
essential workers
Fiction by John Byutorie
“We walked past the empty beauty products …the only products still on shelves being the newly marketed NeauSkin that rolled out a few months ago alongside a robust marketing scheme complete with cardboard cutout of Reese Witherspoon in deadface…”
it was a hard light, but it’s alright now
by J. L. Tyrrell
“This morning the light came through the blinds the same as it did then. Hard, white, pitiless.”
i came on shift and saw something beautiful today
by Emyr Payne
“I also wondered why an ex-Marine would want to re-train to be a nurse. It just didn’t make sense. Like snow landing in the sea. It always melts.”