SHORT STORIES
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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,”…
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.…
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…
The Provider by Anne C. English
Green was the name of the man from the bank that took my house. He angled his body toward the door the whole time he sat in my home, both legs turned and twisted to the side, feet pointed…
Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia
It takes forty-five minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Wendy repeated her husband Chris’s instruction in her head. It was something he’d say stargazing in the Sonoran Desert with their daughter, Emma, back when they would…
three occupants of an empty home by Klaus Castellano
Siris, 73 Emma’s Friend Space Song Note from the author: This piece comprises three contextually distinct but thematically related episodes. I wrote it not as an arbitrary anthology of three stories, but as one complete work involving three…