Fiction

UPHOLSTERY by Corey Farrenkopf

July 6, 2020

Silva left the tacks on the floor. Rick said to. Sweep up after, it saves time. The upholstery shop smelled of pulled cotton, dry foam, and whatever scent the furniture carried from its original home. Sometimes it was garlic, sometimes mothballs and wine. The plaid wingback chair propped before Silva held an odd copper aroma. He pried rusted staples from the armrest with a pronged screwdriver, tapping its steel end with a rubber mallet. Sometimes the metal was so old it turned to dust beneath Silva’s blows. Just leave them. I’ll cut them out later, Rick would say from behind

DOG TRACING by Mike Andrelczyk

July 5, 2020

I just remembered a maintenance man I used to work with who said he liked to get drunk and trace his dog on big sheets of paper and his garden was lined with pieces of broken hotel sinks. I just remembered this. Out of nowhere. When things come into your mind from out of nowhere it’s like looking at the outline of a dog on a piece of paper. The dog is gone, but its shape is there. This is a memory. Imagine one of those shitty video dissolving effects now. …. …. …. OK. I was standing in the

AFTER SWITCHING ANTIDEPRESSANTS, THE NIGHT STRETCHES by Matthew Mastricova

July 2, 2020

After switching antidepressants, the night stretches over his body as he lies next to you in bed, thinking about dying again, even though he would never tell you that. He would never tell you that for months it has been creeping out his mouth—his death, his parents’ deaths, his students’ deaths, the death (or non-death) that comes in the after death. When he is lucky, he can find an anchor: a pair of your socks balled hidden under the table or a can of apricot La Croix chilled for days. Leftovers of a from-scratch meal you cooked that he packed

THE TODDLERS ARE PLAYING AIRPORT AGAIN by Tucker Leighty-Phillips

July 1, 2020

They’ve partitioned everything: the slide is the runway, the jungle gym is the terminal, covered in tiny travelers; anything with mulch is part of the operations area. Nobody flies. Nobody ever wants to be pilot. The toddlers love every aspect of the airport except for flight. Tickle always wants to be the rampie, loading freight onto planes with his sandbox bucket. Dasha is the lav agent, as she’s the best at keeping the plane’s bathrooms within regulation. Everyone wants to be Bill Boyer, Jr, CEO. They fight over his stock options until they shove one another and you have to

KILLING PLANTS by Aaron Kreuter

June 30, 2020

It was during Fletcher’s third week at the new job that he noticed Colleen’s plant didn’t look so hot. The plant’s big green leaves were sagging, nearly touching the desk. Nobody had asked him to take care of the plant during his ten-month contract, filling in for Colleen while she was on mat leave, but the plant was obviously thirsty. Fletcher filled up his coffee mug with water and poured it into the off-white pot, the soil quickly sucking it up. Just to be safe, he tipped in a second mugful; this time, a half-inch of water remained sitting on

TIME TRAVELING ANTIQUE DEALER by Travis Dahlke

June 29, 2020

The owner of Beachman’s eBay store had it bad for my best friend Gedaliah. I didn’t trust him because his eyeballs were made three times smaller by his glasses and it was rumored he kept a time machine in his stockroom used for poaching antiques. The eBay thing was just a front and a former ketchup plant kept the whole operation mostly hidden from public view. Gedaliah paid nine hundred dollars for her walnut pembroke table but the bureau that Beachman sold me was a reproduction with drilled-in wormholes. Gedaliah’s table reeked of tea bags close up. The nails piecing

THE FAMILY THAT SKIS TOGETHER by Kim Magowan

June 27, 2020

“The family that plays together stays together,” Carol’s father used to say, though even at the time Carol had felt skeptical about that assessment, given her mother’s aversion to all forms of competition and her brother’s more specific aversion to losing. Oh, the way Alec’s skin would mottle, the way he would say, under his breath so their parents couldn’t hear, “Well, fuck you,” when Carol would knock his croquet ball into the trees. (And Carol would feel both elated and ashamed, or more precisely, ashamed because elated, and sorry for herself for having a brother who was such a

STILL LIFE, WAYNE COUNTY, IN AUGUST by Aliceanna Stopher

June 24, 2020

Buddy of mine used to have me over before his girl walked out on him. For supper, you know, or cards. Maybe beers, if one of us was going through it. We weren’t usually, back then. More like, we thought we were, but really we weren’t. I’d bring him Dad or Bert, he’d bring me working, or not. We laid it all out, sorted through it. I ran into him on my way to work, this one night before we was supposed to get together. He cancelled, standing all crooked, thumbs stabbed through his belt loops, and I thought he

PEN by Neil Clark

June 24, 2020

They put a bomb in my pen. It’s like that film Speed. In Speed, your man Dennis Hopper puts a bomb in a bus. Tells everyone as soon as the speedometer in the bus goes below 50 miles per hour, the bus goes boom. That’s what they did to my pen. If I stop writing, if ink stops leaving my pen, the pen goes boom. Bombs in buses, they do a lot of damage. Bombs in pens? Maybe not so much. But these days, who knows? I’m fucked if I’m going to stop writing to find out. My wrist is

CHALK by R. J. Patteson

June 20, 2020

Look at a man’s shoes, would you look? You can tell a lot, they say. People look at your feet and see the left toe of your boot scuffed black and they don’t know that you do it for the wind, man. That you kick the shift up, up, up, man, you kick it. And for what? You say, “The wind, man, I do it for the wind.” And you scare your mother and other people’s mothers when you ride by, and maybe you get too close or you get too loud. They look at their sons through the mirrors