SHORT STORIES
Assassin, Alchemist by Robert Ren
For weeks now, the police have been looking for a man. Thin build, five-foot-six, black hair. Sketches make him look like a scrawny, scruffy, Asian Robert Downey Jr., though even in black and white, graphite on smooth grain paper,…
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Pig Son by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Since my ex-wife and I buried our son, I have committed myself wholeheartedly to my lab, growing hearts and other organs inside of pigs that could have saved Peter. It’s his birthday today, which means Laura texts me more…
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The Wishing Pot by Kathryn Paulsen
For a year she saved her pennies in a red earthen pot lined with plastic wrap, which had formerly housed a chrysanthemum plant. The pot, clean, but still displaying some hardened dirt around the edges, occupied the center of…
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Help Us See Your Face by Susan Kleinman
Chesed shel emet they call it—the truest loving-kindness, preparing a body for burial. Truest, because it is done at inconvenient times, in harshly lit rooms. Truest, because touching dead people isn’t fun. Truest, because the kindness can never be…
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The Warden’s Prowess by Ethan Chatagnier
The warden’s prowess with pastry had improved much over the years. It was all we heard the old inmates talk about. They talked about it the way old men on the outside talked about wars everyone else had forgotten.…
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River Bandit by Carl Napolitano
For my mother In the past month, ten rivers had gone missing. Throughout the South, zigzagging up and eastward from the Gulf Coast, tributaries popped up dry. Their dryness could be seen from above in a helicopter, funny…
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The Knife Intifada by Dewaine Farria
The night sky above the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shufat burned with magnesium. Sizzling flares swayed to the earth on tiny parachutes, trailing smoke tendrils like a demon’s nostrils. Yaccoub leaned over his elbow onto the ambulance’s open windowsill,…
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2.25.64 by Mark Farrington
Into the arena comes the somber and menacing figure of Charles “Sonny” Liston, aptly named the most frightening man in the world. People said the war changed your father but your mother disagreed. “It just gave him license,”…
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Ricochet by Paul Crenshaw
The boy woke to the sound of his father grabbing the gun. He heard his father sit up in bed, heard his feet touch the floor. Heard him switch the safety on and clear the round in the chamber.…
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The Solution Woman by Kenan Orhan
Gökçe watches her younger brother stride up the street to her flower shop in his only suit coat, carrying a borrowed briefcase. The coat does not have holes yet, but the hem of the sleeve has come undone, and…
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