FICTION
“Vacations” by Megan Giddings
Tana is dating a person who calls herself The Red Spirit of Joy. She is fussy about details: her clothes are red, never crimson, not scarlet. Don’t get fancy with the descriptors, Tana, she says while putting on lipstick. My…
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“Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses” by Bret Anthony Johnston
His daughter’s first horse came from a traveling carnival where children rode him in miserable clockwise circles. He was swaybacked with a patchy coat and split hooves, but Tammy fell for him on the spot and Atlee made a cash…
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“The Beast” by Megan Cummins
Twenty years had passed since I’d last seen the Beast. We were seventeen and embarrassed of one another back then. I’d asked him to prom. He agreed on the conditions that I would cover expenses, and that we would have…
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“The Renaissance Person Tournament” by Clare Beams
The tournament is the highlight of our year at the Simmler School, figuratively and literally: Abe Larson, math teacher and advisor to the tech club, uses acid-bright bulbs in the auditorium spotlights. He likes to make the contestants sweat. Abe…
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“Be God” by Michael McGriff
Be God. Step way back for a second. Imagine this folded earth as bed sheets dropped in heaps onto the floor. Now stick a steep winter light off to the east. Call this a landscape. Tall shadows form across the…
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“Singles” by Kate Petersen
Lisanne had known Mike-who-worked-the-door for so long that they no longer said anything to each other, and though he’d stopped carding her years ago, she still took hers out of her wallet and cupped it in her palm as she…
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“The Station” by Elizabeth Gaffney
Louisa twisted herself in the cord of the old black wall phone. It went once around her body and five times around her arm. The thing was long enough that you could talk on the phone while rooting through the…
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“Tidings of the Apocalypse” by Patrick Ryan
You try not to get caught up in the prophesies of this world because they all stem from the idea that one omniscient God has decided to destroy what he’s created, while the more interesting prophecies come from other worlds…
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“Cathedral” by Michael Sheehan
The pamphlet they got from La Fonda said the trail was only 3.5 miles long, but they’d been at it for almost four hours by the time they realized something was off. They had seen no cathedral and worse, the…
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“Isn’t It Big? Isn’t It Nice?” by Jonathan Durbin
And suddenly then everyone was getting married. In October alone I had three weddings in the woods three weekends in a row. To each I wore the same nude heels but different backless dresses and elegant plum gloss that made…
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