Fiction

WHALE WATCHING by Kelly Dasta

May 30, 2025

My dead friend isn’t supposed to be on the whale watching tour. It’s a pale summer morning, the harbor glazed with fog. I’m standing on the boat’s upper deck directing tourists aboard, gesturing to empty seats, passing out pamphlets. And there she is, lined up behind a family of five. She’s wearing a navy windbreaker, jean shorts, and muddy white sneakers. Why are you here? I ask. You’re scared of the ocean. Only the Pacific, she says. The Atlantic is fine. I say, Okay, but don’t freak out the children. We jet off, gliding over the glass panes of the

POWERPOINT JESUS by Izzi Sneider

May 22, 2025

I found the file by accident. It was tucked between Q3BudgetProjections.pptx and TeamSalesSeminar_2021(final_FINAL2).pptx on the shared drive. Jesus.pptx Just like that. I clicked it out of curiosity. Or maybe boredom. It’s hard to tell the difference between the two when you spend the day in an office staring at spreadsheets that mean nothing to you. The file was empty. One blank white slide. No title. No bullet points. No formatting. Just a white void. A warmth emanated from the screen. I stared at it for a while. I bathed in its glow. My body slackened. My thoughts dulled to a

SEA MAIDENS by Ravi Mangla

May 20, 2025

Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size. At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose

SEASON OF THE RAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH HALL by Aiden Brown

May 19, 2025

Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of

CITY DESK by Michael McSweeney

May 14, 2025

Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man’s legs swell and he didn’t want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As

A GAME OF GO by RY

May 9, 2025

A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming

PEARL HUNTER by Pablo Baler, translated from Spanish by Slava Faybysh

May 7, 2025

Before getting into bed, Gaspar Santos plopped his dentures into a glass of water. He adjusted himself into a comfortable position between the sheets, sinking into the softened mattress, and eased gently into his sleep. Back in his younger days he had been a pearl hunter, and in the wee hours of night he dreamt he was diving deep in the sea, exposed once again to sharks and fanciful currents. Darkness and silence besieged him, and no matter which way he looked, he could not make out an oyster. All at once he realized he had descended deeper than was

SPRING FORMULA by Tom Snarsky

May 5, 2025

I notice some crocodile cracking near the bend, which is already pitched the wrong way—against the turn, so as a car’s tires point left the road’s normal force pushes it right, recipe for a rollover—and think somebody’s going to get killed. So I go to the municipal office to complain, but no one’s there. BE BACK SOON says the sign. So I grab one of the envelopes and start to write on it, just right on the envelope, my name is Ryan Pendleton I live at 29 Keep Tryst Rd in the Hermitage and someone’s going to get hurt and

Wonder Meadow by David Hayden

May 2, 2025

The night trees were blue by the Wensum. Eels seethed in a ditch. In the flint wall of a garden a door trembled. A green man sat naked on the riverbank, his feet in the water, head nodding, vines and tendrils ran down his chest. A swan guzzled between his legs, blood flowed down his mossy thighs. Twitching and jiggling, burning ropes suspended from the boughs of a hawthorn tree. Across a playing field the cathedral rose, all spire, dissolving sour yellow into the sky, drifting towards the moon. Cakes were scattered in the mud by the Watergate. The girl

TOOTH by Joe Johnson

April 30, 2025

The itch begins in the jawbone under the gums. I can’t get to it with a finger or tongue or backscratcher. Have to let it itch, like watching a fly you can’t swat tickle your forearm. It’s happened before. Happens more these days. Nothing shows up on x-rays, and now dental insurance is all used up. The tooth itches as the boss talks. He’s wearing a suit on casual Friday. It’s gray and fits him in the shoulders but not the belly, so he leaves it unbuttoned. The blue striped tie hangs over his belt. It’s like he’s guest-hosting a