Fiction

IN A SMALL TOWN (CALLED AMERICA) by Christian Fennell

December 21, 2019

It’s getting worse, and Jake finished his beer, and together they listened to the rain on the tin roof of the drive-shed; the receptiveness of its falling; the comfort within its echoing. Things are lookin up, said Jake. Damn straight, said Jared. I mean, now that things are great again, things are lookin up, and Jake stood and walked to the fridge and grabbed two more beers. He passed one to Jared and sat back down on the block of cracked white oak. He took a sip and looked at Jared. I went and saw the doc. Oh? Said I’m

PROBLEM CHILD by Ellen Huang

December 20, 2019

Ariel often got in trouble for trying to escape. That was how he saw it, anyway. He spent much of his time enigmatically testing the limits of his body, such as a current frustrating inability to become liquid. “If cats can do it, why can’t I?” he’d grumble. He’d try to vanish into the air but trip over balls of yarn left around the house. He was losing the skill of leaving his body. He was losing memory of transcendent experience fast. They considered him distracted. His eyes were often elsewhere, in a different time and place, some good old

“WHAT? NO.” by Scott Bryan

December 19, 2019

One time, at least, an elephant ate a bat. It wasn’t a mistake, either. Nothing is. It wasn’t like the bat was flying around, all willy-nilly, and the elephant was yawning, as pachyderms have a tendency to do, and the bat just, like, zigged when it should have zagged, and instead of a mouthful of cud or hay or greens, delivered by way of a droopy, rough, wet schnoz, the poor elephant unintentionally brought down their ill-equipped herbivore’s chompers (humiliated and hiding behind the impressive tusks of fortune which had been bestowed by whatever glue-sniffing god to whom elephants pray

WOODED LOTS by Amanda Baldeneaux

December 18, 2019

Bess’s grandmother leans a sharp elbow into the worn armrest of her recliner, her chin pointed away from the kitchen chair where Bess sits, signing the contract for Ray, the homecare aid. Her grandmother has lived in the cottage at the nursing home for five years. The cottage lets retirees live independently but connected to the lodge and the cafeteria and the dorms where the older, less-resourceful people live. She doesn’t want to go there. Outside the cottage, a small slab of patio is littered with sunflower seed shells. Petals of white azalea blossoms, knocked free by the recent rains,

UNCLE CHARLIE’S BICYCLE by Rick White

December 17, 2019

Esther lived in corners. And behind the backs of armchairs. In the black and white shadows cast by the TV which Ma sat in front of all day. Saturday afternoons was wrestling—Ma’s favourite—and the other kids, the other ‘no-hoper-kids’ the ‘wargs of the state’ all gathered round to watch. ‘That’s the Black Bomber,’ Ma would shout. ‘Sergeant Nitro. The Masked Intruder,’ she would shriek and holler from her sunken nicotine throne. Haloed in cigarette smoke—powder blue and sulfurous yellow. Esther was a mark, a low-carder; the perpetual victim of the rowdy, hyped up boys and their fighting ways. Clotheslines, DDT’s,

I FIRST MET ZAC SMITH IN A BARN by Giacomo Pope

December 17, 2019

I was 250 miles from the nearest streetlight, and my shoes were covered in horse shit. In the centre of the barn was this dude standing on the stacked hay. He was foaming at the mouth and shouting at overfed livestock. Zac was watching these chickens try to kill each other and they were making all this noise, but over the top of it, you could still hear the poems crashing against cracked red paint. The chickens were the stuntmen from Die Hard, and I was reaching into popcorn between my legs. I was sweating. The bigger chicken was digging its face into

REYKJAVIK by Jane Snyder

December 16, 2019

We took the kids on a tour of Iceland for winter break last year. It was Carrie’s first year of college, Tad’s third, and I wanted to do something as a family while we still could. The sun didn’t rise the whole time we were there but everybody seemed to be having a good time. The kindergarten class leaving the National Museum as we were going in, for instance. The children had big bags of candy and were laughing so hard they couldn’t stand it. As soon as they’d start settling down one of them would say something that sounded

DCUQ ANGRUQ by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

December 14, 2019

A discussion in one of my classes, about metafiction, memory and torment, led me to bring up Chuck Jones’s classic cartoon, Duck Amuck. None of my students had heard of it, but that’s typical: they’re students. Still, before showing it in my next class I wanted to see the actual cartoon and not just rely on what I remembered when I first saw it as a kid. I mean who didn’t love the scene where Marvin the Martian takes Daffy aboard his flying saucer so that none of Bugs Bunny’s disintegrator blasts would ever singe his black feathers again? But

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED by Sandra Arnold

December 13, 2019

We called him the Music Man because while he cleaned the headstones he liked singing along to the opera playing on his radio. Sometimes he threw his head back and let his voice soar to the sky, scattering the crows. His singing was so beautiful it softened the fears that lay hard in my heart. It brought Nettle close to tears and closer to remembering. Even Stuck Boy stopped his monologues long enough to listen. The three of us loved watching him at work though he rarely spoke to us except to tell us to bugger off if we got

COVER by Benjamin Kessler

December 12, 2019

The father is accompanying the daughter to the mall. The daughter wants very much to get her ears pierced, and while the father thinks she is too young, he has consented. Though only after making the daughter pull weeds from between the spaces in the driveway concrete. The father doesn’t simply give the daughter everything she wants. He makes her earn it, and this makes him feel like a good parent. He enjoys very much feeling like a good parent, especially in front of the mother. The daughter wants candy from one of the turnstile vending machines and the father