Fiction

BOWLING WITH DRACULA by Justin Gibson

April 28, 2025

The first thing we discovered was that vampires loved contracts. Well, no, sorry, I guess the first thing we discovered was the vampires themselves — that they’re real. We figured it out pretty quick, as pets went missing; as we started to get the heebie-jeebies when twilight flooded our backyards a cool blue; as pale strangers stood outside our windows in the middle of the night and asked if we’d let them in, voices like warm caramel. Very strange stuff for these parts, but very obvious: That’s vampires. But we figured out vampires loved contracts almost right after that. Erik

APPROPRIATE by Andrew P. Heath

April 25, 2025

She said something vague to me. I said something appropriate. She said, What? I said something appropriate. Looking at her. Her collarbone. She said something sarcastic. I said something appropriate. I looked at her collarbone, then slowly looked up at her face. She looked like a cocker spaniel (I did not say that). I had once been very attracted to her. When she would take a shower, I could hear the water running, and I imagined her in there, elegant, graceful, small, her long black hair slicked across her white body. The image was potent and intoxicating, I was drunk

PARENTHETICAL by J. A Gullickson

April 21, 2025

The floor-to-ceiling windows let in so much light that the office is sweltering. Before the sun emerges from behind the tree line, the HVAC system will turn on. These brisk breaths signal the start of a new day for the company. Graham cycles through the presentation again, sinking deeper into his chair. Each slide features a corporate incantation coldly justifying decisions few care for. Key stakeholders have already made up their minds. This is only a formality. In the center of the cube farm lives Hannah. She stares blankly at the two screens in front of her, cursor gliding back

CRYING FROM THE DUST by Jace Einfeldt

April 14, 2025

A week after my baptism, I hit my little brother in the head with a tee-ball bat and sent my whole family into a frenzy on a Saturday afternoon in mid-March and got locked out of the family car and told to sit on the couch and think about what I did while my younger brother bled all over mom’s brand-new dishtowels in the middle seat of our 1998 emerald-green Yukon Denali. As my family flew down the street on angel’s wings, I contemplated what I had done while picking at the beige, peeling leather couch in the living room

OUTSIDE HUSBAND by Natalie Warther

April 9, 2025

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.”

COUSIN FRANCINE by Lynn Marie Rossi

April 7, 2025

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,”

THE COIN by Rose Hollander

April 4, 2025

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

SOLITUDE by Sebastian Castillo

April 2, 2025

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

POOL RULES by William P Adams

April 1, 2025

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

WOLF IT DOWN by Billie Chang

March 31, 2025

I push Ally’s note clean into the corners of my mouth, the motion wet and slow, the ink kissing molar. Finn is in the shower. The bathroom door splintered last week after Mr. Rutabaga ran into it, full force and head-on, in pursuit of a fast spider. We drove him to the on-call vet. He sits now in his doghouse with one less tooth and a tender snout. I can hear Finn’s motions through the wood-chipped cracks: the stumbling as he raises his leg to wash the bottom of his foot, the collapse of water after he pools the drops