Fiction

NAMING CONTESTS by Will Musgrove

October 8, 2024

The cashier, whose name tag reads Barbara, scans my items, a two-liter of Coke and a Milky Way, my usual. It became my usual once I discovered the total, $6.66. Barbara, wearing a faded Looney Tunes T-shirt, won’t say the amount out loud like she does with every other customer. Instead, she stares at me as if I’m summoning a sugar-powered demon. The number never fails to get a reaction, unlike the fact I’m dressed as a cell phone. I pay and grab my stuff off the counter, which is made difficult by the big white gloves velcroed to my

CREEP by Julia Meinwald

October 7, 2024

Arriving home from work, Mina noticed a man crawling along her building’s perimeter. He was close to the wall, his bare shoulders almost touching the dirty brick exterior, and wore only a pair of plain white underwear. He had a grim, determined look on his face, which was clean but partially covered by a coarse, unruly beard. He was very thin. The man looked down at the ground as he crawled. Mina watched him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for a number of minutes. Only after he’d crept out of sight did she dash in the

FIVE OF THE WAYS I WISH I WAS MORE LIKE MOISSANITE by Patrick Eades

October 2, 2024

People often ask me what my spirit animal is. I’m not sure why I am asked so frequently. Maybe they are unsure if I am still human. Or maybe it is the clear spirits mixed with bile I have used to decorate their terrazzo floors that confuses them, and they are not sure whether to use lion strength metho or if bumblebee spray-and-wipe will be enough. In any case, I tell them I don’t have a spirit animal, but if I could choose a spirit mineral, it would be Moissanite. Moissanite is somewhat of an unknown in the spirit world,

FLATLAND by Lana Frankle

September 27, 2024

A female patient of 29 years came to my care for what she described as “a strange break, an awful break” in her leg. After examining by palpitation I was able to verify that the lower portion of her left leg had indeed been severed, just below the knee joint. However, the contour of the juncture of this tear was quite unusual, namely, it was unusually smooth. Even breaks due to puncture by a sharp corner or line tend to leave some level of raggedness and unevenness. Upon noticing this, I asked her permission to make a proper documentation of

IF I CAN DREAM by Mike Wilson

September 25, 2024

Did I ever tell you I saw Elvis Presley, years after they said he was dead? Saw him right after I first moved to town, walking through the parking lot of that run down, barely hanging on truck stop over off of Highway 45, a place called The Hungry Hauler. They said he lived in the nearby woods and would come in on occasion to eat and wash up. They were used to him and wouldn’t make a big deal about it, and didn’t like people who did. He was an old man by then, and moved slow any time

THE OSTRICH ECONOMY by Audrey Lee

September 23, 2024

Cammie has a Hermés Birkin pulled up on a resale website. She pushes the blinding screen towards my face across the white tablecloth between us. She’s talked about wanting a Birkin before, but I didn’t really think about it that much. “It’s ostrich leather,” Cammie says, and she pouts. Her raspy voice is hushed over the trepid steakhouse pianist on the baby grand. What does it take in life to become a steakhouse pianist? “It’s an investment piece. Ostrich leather is going to have better resale value than cow leather. But it’s much less than crocodile.” The orange pinpricked leather

TOM CLANCY DID NOT WRITE DOMESTIC THRILLERS AND DEFINITELY DIED ON OCTOBER 1ST, 2013 by Evan Hannon

September 19, 2024

The sun rises late in the morning, creeping above the treeline like the encroaching fingers of some lethargic yet sinister god of anti-democratic thought. It’s hard not to feel like the entire world is turning against me. I lean against the kitchen’s marble countertop and remind myself the sunlight isn’t the enemy. The natural world knows right and wrong. If only the same could be said for man. Above my head, I hear my wife Barbra rise, the soft creak of wood, the exhale of bed springs. Even the good guys have to get their hands dirty. My battlefield is

WOMAN OF STEEL by Valerie Hegarty

September 18, 2024

Yesterday in ceramics class Prof Woodstock did a demo of red glazes while telling us an old Chinese legend. Once there was an emperor who demanded a red glazed pot. The royal potter fired pot after pot, but could not get any of them to fire red. So the emperor sentenced him to death. The potter’s daughter was so upset she jumped in the fired kiln, and when they opened it all the pots were glazed red with her blood. Prof Woodstock said as a feminist she wasn’t thrilled with the story, but it showed the difficulty of producing a

KNIVES by Sean Hayes

September 16, 2024

I was gonna be a salesman. I took an elevator up to the third floor and followed signs taped to the walls with directional arrows and Trajectory Marketing Demo printed on them. They led to an office with an open door. There were guys with hair gelled, cut, buzzed, or combed into all different shapes wearing oversized suits and ties, the kind that’d only been worn to funerals. My hair was shaggy again and I was wearing my beat-up Christmas slippers, Nike sweatpants, and my Arc’teryx fleece riddled with cigarette burns like I was some weird spotted animal. I just

FLORIDA MAN by Bridget Adams

September 13, 2024

THE MAN SITTING ON MY COUCH HAS OBTAINED HIS ALLIGATOR HARVEST PERMIT Yes, it’s true! We haven’t fucked yet but soon you’ll be crouched in the greased dark of a velvet panhandle midnight, your rifle pointed squarely in the center of an alligator’s long flat head, between the ridges of its eyes. The animal’s body looks like a topographic map, bone-hard hills and valleys laid over with skin too tough for bullets at anything but close range. “Alligators are really hard to kill,” you say, and I want to give the curve of your ear one long lick as you