Fiction

OUT OF JOINT by Miranda González

February 17, 2021

Edgar was a man with a peculiar malady. It wasn’t just that he had a voracious appetite for all things internet and a quick temper. No, it was that when he read something online that upset him, his nose became, quite literally, out of joint. Each time he furiously disagreed with a news article or a post from an opinionated relative, the cartilage of his nose would turn ever so slightly—imperceptibly—counter-clockwise. The phenomenon seemed to begin following a particularly distressing piece of journalism about an out-of-state investor buying up his favorite Texas burger joint. (He could never enjoy his patty

BURN THE SHIPS by John Darcy

February 12, 2021

The first scam was parking outside the bank, mobile-depositing a check, running inside to cash it with the teller. He dubbed it The Double Derring-Do. Loopholes find fault in failures of imagination. It’s about outsmarting, round-abouting. Okay, he did end up with two years for wire fraud. Watching a scumbag stoner conman movie, he whispers, “That’s not what it’s like.” On his computer are two hundred years of pirated movie soundtracks. He’s working his way through them. Also the first two acts of a five-act play, stellar dialogue but lacks compelling conflict. Policies in triplicate because it never hurts to

CUTTING ROOM by Tex Gresham

February 10, 2021

The woods stopped being an enchanted place where the sound of animals scurrying through undiscovered territory felt light and natural. Sunlight blocked, trees strangling the brassy tones into a steel-tinged umber. A fluorescence coated every surface, something we’d walked into, a transition from scene to setting. Maybe it was the deer that brought this change––maybe it was something else. Limp and drained, the deer’s face was a shocked mask of deadness. Blood spumed out its crooked mouth like seafoam on the surf of a slaughterhouse floor. I was a boy out hunting with his dad and uncle in the humid

MOMENT by Chad Redden

February 8, 2021

A little raccoon, more sponsor than mascot, came with the moment, came down the tree. We waited below the tree, Ryan and me. Waited for the racoon that came with the moment, but it was a tall tree, it took some time. For the racoon. For the tree to grow that tall, how many years I cannot speculate. I cannot look at a tree and say how much time it took for a tree to grow. It took some time for the racoon to reach the ground. After a while Ryan had to leave, before the racoon could reach the

SCAFFOLDING by Zac Smith

February 5, 2021

I went golfing. I hit the ball. It landed in the hole (=hole in one). I walked 227 yards to the green place where the hole was that the ball went in. I looked in the… the golf hole, the hole where the ball goes, where mine went. But I didn’t see my ball. It was dark in the ball hole. I lay down on the green stuff around the ball hole, on my stomach, and put my face up to the hole. I thought maybe it was just really deep or something and I could reach in up to

TREES by Mordecai Martin

February 4, 2021

Sometimes the world falls away. Oh well! So long, World! I have a small house, though not so small that we would call it tiny. It’s just a quiet little place where no one but the bank can throw us out, and where we can play host to some friends in need. I look outside my window at the tree shaking in the wind, and I think about it falling down, crashing through my door. I suppose this is what I am most afraid of in a world that has gone wild: that it will intrude upon the small, calm

ADULT CONTENT by Jamie Kahn

February 3, 2021

My tenth grade biology teacher is the first person to ever tell me that I look like [One Specific Porn Star], though he doesn’t really tell me in his own words. Instead, I inquire about his stares to friends in my class to no avail until one boy claims to have seen porn on his laptop during school hours. “What does that have to do with me?” I ask. He shows me a video during study hall. The resemblance is undeniable. That night, I fall into the never-ending black hole of videos featuring [One Specific Porn Star]. I see the

THE CONSTELLATIONS OF YOUR BEDROOM by Chris Vanjonack

February 1, 2021

After stumbling drunk into your bedroom, crawling onto your twin-sized mattress, and wrapping yourself in dirty bedsheets, you find that you are staring into oblivion. You can see the stars, the moon, and an airplane, each obscured only somewhat due to the haze of neon lights surrounding your apartment. The air is cold and you are so overwhelmed by your hour-old breakup on the dancefloor of a crowded dive bar that it takes you longer than it should to process what would otherwise be obvious: Your ceiling is gone. Still sad about your ex, you rack your brain for how

JUNE by Rosella Birgy

January 29, 2021

I. The lady who owns the condo keeps a bonsai tree that she regularly forgets to water. She wears an ankle bracelet and her best friend is a nineteen-year-old boy who “works” maintenance for the complex in the summer in exchange for a living space that’s not with his parents. His father is a no feelings kind of guy and his mother hasn’t stopped taking Valium in the three years since his older brother died in a car crash and he doesn’t know if college “is for him,” the lady writes us in her letter of instructions for general upkeep

DUNHUANG, IN THE SUMMER by Jiaqi Kang

January 28, 2021

is beige and washed with soft, settled dust. It nests between sand dunes, two-tone hills that whistle and whisper at dusk, the breeze bringing mysterious dreams to those who sleep under its soupy night sky. My guests, pilgrims whose cotton shifts are streaked with the brown patterns of their journeys, spend the last of their silver on a bed and a meal in my inn. They are tired, worn, and bone-thin, but there is that momentary sense of relief in their eyes when they clap an ugly coin into my palm. I lead them to their cots and my husband