Fiction
August Contributors
Aditya Bhatia,Cooper Clarence, and Kenton Sage Schmidt
let me tell you a secret
by Shawn Scott Smith
“I put the car in drive, and head home, alone, another late night looking for hope in the aisles of Walmart.”
synthesize
by Emily Teresa
“Loving tendrils guide my hard-segmented body up. In the mirror—I can actually see now. My new form. Red shell, like dried blood made into armor. Segmented plates running down my torso and my limbs. Sharp and beautiful…I truly am beautiful.”
what remains
by Té V. Smith
“She told stories, and he listened with cautious attention. While she was speaking, a tune passed through him. Not a song exactly—a rise and fall, a shaping of breath.”
the ecstasy of eleanor abernethy
by Tif Robinette
“Her mother knelt her at the altar of the cabbage soup diet as a young girl, a penitential broth of vegetables and powdered onion mix that left her perpetually dizzy and prone to fainting spells punctuated by thunderous sulphuric farts..”
yes, now
by Seth Parker
“You found the bird under the bedroom window and said it had to be buried…“Now?” I asked….“Yes, now.”
once a hero always a…
by Tyler Efford
“[Society] always teetering on the edge, pretending everything’s fine while the cracks keep spreading underneath.
strike
by Jonathan Jackson
“We count prayer-hands emojis, watch our pain trend upward, and see our wounds be rewarded with reach.”
the duel
by Jesse Lifton
““If you do not duel me to restore the honor you have besmirched, I will shoot you dead.”
soft pack
by Jack Timko
“The leaves rustled beneath our feet as we ambled along, each of us replicating observed behavior of familiar adults or movie actors, balancing a Kool between the tips of our middle and forefingers, the cherries burning vermilion.”
the self-checkout lane
by Rick Taliaferro
“But Harris kept his serious face on as he gingerly lifted and opened the bag. For a second, a whole fryer chicken. The next second, a tuft of dark hair, squinted eyes, blue lips parted. He recoiled as he dropped the baby.”
shrinking
by Tom Newcomer
“He wished for exciting memories, to have enjoyed a memorable life. Intriguing and mysterious events, secrets left untold. The kind of past that catches up with you, he thought. That’s the thing.”
smarter™
by Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos
“Margaret had never been smart and—being acutely aware of it—was insecure, hence her choosing a random topic that was of no interest to anyone.”
foreclosure season
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.”
the jackals
by Finnegan James McBride
“Sand crunched under Sharon’s feet as she approached the tent. The lake shimmered in her peripheral vision. Her hands were cold. In the woods, the jackals wailed like they were pleading for something.”
the last trip
by Kris Green
“I don’t remember my mother’s death. I remember things around it. The smell of her car, the night table with the hankies, and then random things that come back to me.”
cat week
by David Hinson
“Cats appeared again the following year, in a newsroom in South Dakota, a design studio in California, a public relations firm in Texas, and a commercial real estate company in Mississippi. And then it didn’t happen again that year or the next year…”
meat
by Eylie Sasajima
“Sweet rot of deer carcass wakes me in my ditch nest. It is juicy warm amidst the crisp frost of a long night.”
pound 4 pound
by JP Lor
“We’re gonna watch my girl’s ex get beat up. The plan is simple: go to his cage match and collect a few things – his blood, sweat, hair, hopefully teeth. Then we’re gonna burn them in a pot I got at Goodwill. Burn him from our lives.”
certain ends
by Sacha Bissonnette
“I thought about her now, her unwillingness to settle, and her secrets. And though I swore to not be like her, maybe that too, is futile. And how we never figured it out. My mother’s truth.”
break
by Christopher Kostyn Passante
“The cobalt light first appeared outside Caelan’s window the night Evie went through the ice. A small orb no bigger than a butternut and shrouded in updrafts of blown snow played at the witch window in the guest loft of their half-Cape…”