Category: Fiction

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    Katherine Tunning

    THE SIMULATION In the first level I fight a bird with needles for feathers. None of it is a surprise: not the bird, not the needles, not the fighting. There was a lot of paperwork beforehand, and the waivers were very clear. Still, the realism is startling, even though that was the promise, the whole…

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    Rina Palumbo

    CANKER There was a peach tree there. It was the smallest of all the trees, a small trunk with only three main branches and never seemed to change, unlike the apple trees that seemed taller, leafier, and fruitier year after year. Apple trees are glorious in bloom, but peach blossoms are even more so, and…

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    Kenneth Jakubas

    PLUNGER My Grandfather made an inspiring promise to his sons after all three of their marriages lasted ten years. If their marriages made it another ten years, he’d be taking them to Alaska. “That’s where they kill you. Silenced pistols,” my sister said ten years later, when our parents’ twentieth was approaching. We were at…

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    Travis Dahlke

    JUDI DENCH It found us in the basement with humming pipes trapped by wood paneled walls when it was your turn to play GoldenEye. A split screen death-match against me, Xenia Onatopp, after I smoked Chris who was Baron Samedi. No blood. You, sister of Chris, chose Helicopter Pilot. A storm gathered the afternoon’s heat…

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    Avalon Felice Lee

    LITTLE SOLDIER Before, I knew only what I must: pre-war, China; post-war, America. I was only nine then, watching you beneath an ancient breed of red lanterns, the grocery aisle awash in a cheap yellow native to San Francisco, a yellow made you look older than a grandmother. There was something different about how the…

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    Brett Biebel

    SPAM FACTORY We ate cans of the stuff during the ’85-’86 strike.  Dad smuggled them out of the plant starting maybe six months prior.  One at a time.  He sensed it all coming, and so it was every smoke break and every lunch, and his whole life he never took vacation or sick leave or…

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    Laura Schmitt

    STORM CELLS We figured there was a problem, a rather serious one, when our son Landen started playing in the bathroom and only the bathroom. He would collect his action figures and stuffed animals from his bedroom and haul them to the bathroom off the kitchen, the one with the most interior walls. Sometimes he…

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    Casey Bell

    DIRT TO SEA I am lying on the wet pavement. I bring my fingers to my face and where there should be bone, there is wetness and softness. My right eye is swollen shut. Blood flows from my broken nose down the back of my throat. I swallow it, warm and metallic, to keep from…

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    Kathryn Holzman

    The Aquarium Even with the classroom windows closed, Aron could still smell the smoke. Off in the distance, the Los Padres National Forest smoldered. In front of the class, Maya was reading her essay aloud. “What I did over the summer.” Balancing on one tanned foot, she read. “In August, my family visited the Monterey…

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    Yun Wei

    IT WAS A WATERMELON LOVE Juicy, sweet and fast. Alice was fifteen that summer and in Provence with her family on their first trip to Europe, when she saw the boy at the motel pool in neon green swim trunks and black sunglasses. Gabe had offered her a slab of gum. By sunset they were…