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FISHING FOR KAT by Wendy BooydeGraaff

April 11, 2025 · Micros

He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant. At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.

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JAKOB, I DO! UNTIL I DON’T! by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch

April 10, 2025 · Micros

We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and…

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OUTSIDE HUSBAND by Natalie Warther

April 9, 2025 · Fiction

The survivalist stuff started as a hobby for my husband. An attempt to disconnect from the tech-dependent modern world. But quickly, our renovated backyard started looking more like a trash dump than a place to entertain the neighbors. He just kept making “tools.” Dental floss snares. Crayon candles. Pantyhose fishing nets. Dryer lint tinder. Maple syrup mouse traps. He used every single trash bag in the house for the water collection system. “Where are your shoelaces?” I called to my sons as they trudged towards the bus stop, flopping out of their sneakers. “Dad took them for his tourniquet kit.”…

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VINYL HOUSES by Willow Campbell

April 8, 2025 · Micros

There is a bony woman measuring things on the playground. She has a long tape measure that hooks in place. One end hugs the edge of a railroad tie bordering the perimeter of the wood chips. She measures the circumference of the area. She measures by the slide, the length of the monkey bars, the distance from climbing pyramid to swing set, and writes the numbers down in a three-ring notebook. The kids pay her no mind. They screech and race each other to the swings and climb up ladders and hang upside down. The woman deposits the tape measure…

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COUSIN FRANCINE by Lynn Marie Rossi

April 7, 2025 · Fiction

All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed. “I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals. But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!” “We live on the Upper West Side,”…

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FACIAL GEOMETRY by Sagar Nair

April 6, 2025 · Micros

When he was a child, my dad lost two fingers working at the matchbox factory and declared three as his lucky number. He owned three of every shirt, prayed three times a day, and went to the Lygon casino on the third of each month. He ate ramen with three chopsticks, and sticky dots of broth sprayed across the table, onto his Tim Winton novels. We liked the crunch of Cajun grilled corn. We toothpicked kernels from between our teeth, and threw the cobs at each other’s heads. Pretended to have seizures on the floor. On the drive to the…

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THE COIN by Rose Hollander

April 4, 2025 · Fiction

I spent my twenties working at a bike shop in a midwestern college town. The town was thick with rationality, overflowing from the university. Despite this, I believed in God. The strength of my belief shifted from day to day, but when I stood in church each Sunday my faith was strong again. My boyfriend, Don, agreed to come to church after two months of dating. “I can see it’s important to you,” he said. “So I’ll come. But don’t count on any sudden transformation when I hear the organ music.” And I knew that he was right, that his…

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AN ECHO IS FOREVER by David Luntz

April 3, 2025 · Micros

Owls hoot to each other across dusking hills—the medieval whorehouses in Genoa are rediscovering electricity—news of masts spotted earlier on the horizon has circled back to them, which they’d divined already, for the seagulls took off from the harbor walls hours before—still, the whores step out onto their balconies, float up to the blanched rooftops, hoot to each other through rising stalks of stars swaying in the dark grange of night—they’re dreaming of sleeping in silk dresses, bathing in gold florins, myrrh and musk, tracing with inward eyes the moonlit-draped, rudder-furrowed wakes of phosphorous, the billowing sash of earth’s shadow…

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SOLITUDE by Sebastian Castillo

April 2, 2025 · Fiction

The purchasing of books is life’s finest pleasure. And while I often have a stack of them unread, they are read eventually, and therefore this habit does not seem excessive or indulgent to me. It is perhaps a bourgeois affectation—there is something embarrassing of an over-large personal library—but there are certainly less healthy ways to spend one’s money. I am no stranger to that, certainly. If God and constancy may will it, that period of my life is closed shut, like a book I’d like to forget entirely. Those pages are wine-soaked anyhow, grainy with drug-powder, the words to those…

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POOL RULES by William P Adams

April 1, 2025 · Fiction

The below-ground swimming pool in our neighbor Robbie Garvin’s backyard was ready. Robbie’s father, the beneficiary of a large insurance settlement, wasted no time improving the Garvins’ status in the neighborhood. I heard my parents talking about it; they used terms like ‘not above board’ and ‘possible fraud,’ which I knew nothing about. The pool was heated and had a diving board – enough said. Robbie let on at school that he would throw a start-of-summer pool party on the first Saturday after school was out. He bragged that there would be unlimited food and drink and bikini-clad girls from…

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