Fiction

HUNTING & GATHERING by Keely Curttright

February 26, 2025

Margot is a speck of red in her bright winter coat, scurrying up the cracked and litter-strewn sidewalk, her mousy brown hair a sad pinprick at the center of this speck and her breath a puff of vapor before her. This is, at least, how she envisions herself. She rarely leaves the apartment anymore, but when she does, she finds herself imagining her appearance, always as something unsuspecting and insignificant. She has tried to give up this habit but can’t help herself. A bug-eyed pigeon hops across the sidewalk and pecks at a discarded bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. As

IDLE ANIMATION by Ryan Petersen

February 7, 2025

I made sure never to start the day. Abstained from True Conscious Hours. And yet, somehow, it went on without me. The sweat underneath my upper thighs became my five o’clock work whistle, an inarguable sign that the day was already over, before it had ever begun. Weeks went by like this. So smooth and easy that I hardly took notice. For I was a junkie, refreshing my feed with abandon, in willful avoidance of the aforementioned True Conscious Hours. YouTube was where I found the good stuff. I let the algorithm swaddle me tight, held in close by its

HOUSE FLY by Megan Nichols

February 6, 2025

Superstition slipped in with the last of the September flies. My hands were full and I couldn’t get the door shut fast enough behind me. There was a clog in the bathroom sink where drain flies had nested. Something about my slowness made me wonder if we didn’t deserve it. Jake said to get hot vinegar if I was too damn scared of store bought bug killer. The sour smell drove him out all afternoon and when he came back he saw I had let the vinegar boil out. He headed upstairs with a bottle of bleach but found the

YIELDING AS GLASS YIELDS TO FIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MANDIRA PATTNAIK by Rebecca Gransden

February 4, 2025

Shifting states. The novel-in-flash Glass/Fire (Querencia Press, 2024) exhibits the unfolding travails of girlhood, a reality adorned in rich contradiction and symbolism. Mandira Pattnaik’s sumptuous language carries forth a deep and sensuous meditation on life’s volatility. The wildness of nature’s forces at their most capricious lend an elemental intensity to fate. A dynamic and revealing exploration of growth, I talked to the author about the book. Rebecca Gransden: In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us. You open the book with the above line.

she transmogrified in my bed by Rylie Farr

January 27, 2025

My girlfriend has started a new regiment this week. She told me after coming home yesterday from work. Supposedly, this is supposed to help her achieve her “ideal form.” Every night now she is supposed to take these fluorescent green pills with her dinner. I don’t mind it too much. She becomes so sleepy afterwards, so I tuck her in our bed before sitting out on the couch for a couple of hours. Our flat is now quieter than usual. It seems the side effects are starting to take place in her body. This morning, she woke up before me

BOLOGNA by Sean Hayes

January 24, 2025

We stood on top of our worlds as we knew them. The fall could kill us. Or worse. All part of the thrill. Henny, Walsh, and I were on the last level of scaffolding wrapped around the Bronson Windmill in Fairfield. We were heading into our senior year at Greenfield College Preparatory School. If you think we had on boat shoes judging from the last sentence, you’re wrong. Only Henny and I had on boat shoes. Walsh wore oversized flipflops with bottle openers on the soles. We sat down, dangling our feet over the edge of the scaffolding, swinging them

THE SLEEPING BANKER by Matthew Binder

January 20, 2025

The factory closed the week before Christmas. The owner had moved his operations to Bangladesh. Emanuel had spent eleven years on the assembly line. It was the only job he knew. Marta, his wife, could no longer cut hair. Her condition made her hands tremble to the point that her clients had begun to complain about nicks on their necks and ears. They were three months behind on rent, the electricity was shut off. Their kids were eating crackers and trekking through the snow with holes in their shoes. Emanuel had once had luck betting on football matches. That ended,

NUNS & ROSES by Ana Carrete

January 13, 2025

A nun was cloistered in a convent near me. I knew her. She was the Mother Superior. She was the main bitch. Top energy. She left that cloistered convent and moved to the Midwest. I was visiting the Midwest for poetry and to fuck a writer I’d been sexting with for months. I waxed my pussy right before I went on that trip and that was a mistake. My boyfriend dropped me off at the airport. I took a pill to fall asleep on the plane. When the plane landed, my head was resting on the stranger next to me.

PEGGY by Daisy Alioto

January 10, 2025

Peggy got down on her knees and asked God to send her a good man. She thought she had one in Jack but her friends told her that he wasn’t a good man, or if he was, he was good in the way that men are good which is different from the way that women are good. Something about the difference between a deal and a contract. Peggy thought all goodness was the same and maybe the goodness in Jack was hiding. For six months Peggy and Jack had dinner once a week until one day he stopped answering her

HERE LIES by Nikki Barnhart

January 8, 2025

She had only applied to work in the Halloween store because she thought it would be temporary. But this store was open year-round—the building owned, not leased, by a man named Ed, who was thin and wiry, nostalgic and ambiguous as a figure in a Grant Wood painting. The devotion he extended to the rows of ludicrous masks and cackling witch animatronics seemed more suited to the motions of a farmer, tending to something whose harvest would keep people alive, rather than fleetingly amused. Ed preferred silent, solitary work: keeping inventory, tracking shipments in the back room he seemed to