Fiction

DEAD MOTHER’S CORN OIL by Diane Payne

April 16, 2019

Long Distance Lover was happy I finally agreed to spend time at his dead mother’s cottage in the middle of nowhere. I already lived in the middle of nowhere. After making the 850-mile drive to spend a week or two with him at his house in a real town, with real things to do, I dreaded heading out to the place where he longed to retire. Ahh, her teapot wallpaper in the kitchen. Ooh, the moldy carpet in the living room. Woo, the surprising amount of kitschy lighthouses though we were nowhere near the lake. Then the biggest surprise. His

SIX FEET, BLEEK, AND BURIED by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow

April 15, 2019

Six feet could be ten feet. Six feet could be sixty. Six feet was not a lot. Six feet was one of him. It starts with an ending. Bleek, a man with big hips. They curved against the box. And he saw their fullness. The mirror reflected. Lying, they looked more grave. And he understood why. Why they gave him such looks. Why they envied his curves. Six feet could be ten feet. Six feet could be fifty. Six feet was not a lot. One new fridge—a big box. Bleek had an old iPhone. With service still intact. It was

BUMMING by Chelsea Harris

April 14, 2019

We’re outside the corner store bumming smokes off each other. He’s a redhead, says he’s got a bad habit of picking his face. The whole thing covered in craters. Our friend shows up, Andy. He’s got something to show us. We take a drive. Up the road there’s a car. Totaled. Hit a tree. We get out of ours and I slam the door, hard, a privilege. There’s someone inside the wreck. A crumpled napkin. A pair of puckered lips. Andy tries to pull her out but her body has been deflated. I poke at the airbags. She’s dead, the

ETYMON STREET VIEW by Mike Corrao

April 8, 2019

She (subject) receives a note which says, “I am without past.” On the backside is a photograph of a street sign: Roberta Ave. The crossroad is obscured. What used to be green is now dull and graying. Its metal spine curves to the left. Backgrounds are warped by time. The subject is tasked with determining the origins of this symbol. Finding what has been vacated of context. Erasures performed without audience. Certain criteria are arranged to flesh out her process. Suites are dressed in ethernet cables and blue light filters. Rounds of copper are blanketed in rubberized shells. She moves

THE FIRST TIME I PERFORMED by Benjamin Niespodziany

April 7, 2019

1. The first time I performed in Russia was under the direction of the king. His daughter’s best friend’s wedding was held in a refurbished factory that once made statues of the great whirling dervishes. I was the third piece of the matryoshka at the wedding, jumping out of a cloud once the song started to play. The fellow who fell after me broke his leg, and the rest of the event was a medical disaster. The king got drunk. We still got paid. 2. The first time I performed in Penn Station, an overweight man asked me to be

THE INENARRABLE HEAVINESS OF SEEMING by Will Bernardara Jr.

April 5, 2019

“Perception of a state is not the state.” M. John Harrison A teetering bulb of dread and dream referred to – sometimes, by some – as Wes Boolean walks into a hardware store, his/its synapses scintillating with composite images of saw-teeth and conceptions of disjoining girl-parts. (Interjection: The “bulb” of the foregone ‘graph isn’t a floating sci-fi brain. It [the bulb] is impounded in the standard ossein case of a bipedal primate “person” = Wes Boolean. Thing is, the lump of gray mind-goo is the person; i.e., the “person” is a pattern ejaculated out of cerebral media, and so it’s

LITTLE SISTER, WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD FROM YOU? by Timothy Boudreau

April 4, 2019

We remember the shy teenager who visited aunts and uncles with a novel and a piece of knitting. The adult in an over-sized sweater, huddled in a corner over a cup of tea. Though separated by ten years we had similar interests and for a time considered ourselves creative people. We always meant to collaborate. What happened? * Especially now I feel you may have insight to offer. Wisdom from a place unknown to the rest of us. Thus enclosed find a few ideas. Feel free to alter them in any way. Merge your memories. Melt your vision over mine

GENTLY USED by Olivia Holbrook

April 3, 2019

I sit outside on the hard concrete, feeling the cold seep through the fabric against my thighs, then through my skin, then to my bones. I hold the mug in my hands, they’re shaking. The warmth feels like something distant, warming my palms, making them sweat, while the air numbs my knuckles. And fingers. I see the light in the clouds, reflecting off of something that only my dilated pupils can see. It’s morning. But we’re still here, and I’m still seeing the patterns in the sky that are telling my brain, “you just might not make it to that

SHARP PAIN by Andrew Ciaccio

March 31, 2019

You can get by just fine being dull. You can actually do very well for yourself. My husband was an accountant in suburban Oklahoma at an office above an Applebee’s. He made six figures and drank from a coffee mug with Mount Rushmore engraved on it. He did this every day for 20-some years. Then on a snowy Tuesday, standing at the microwave in his windswept khakis, watching his leftover casserole go round-and-round, he lost his edge. Out the window, kids skated on a makeshift ice rink in the strip mall parking lot. The casserole boiled over then exploded as

HUSK by James Nulick

March 29, 2019

I like them really young. She’s out there scraping the sidewalk like an old idiot. She’s going to wake them up and that would be bad, the young ones like their sleep. I feed off them during sleep. She’s old and she has old ideas and I honestly don’t know why I keep her on. Maybe because she knows my real age, though she’d never say. If Esmeralda were asked by the press about my age she’d say she was born in when she was born, that’s all. ### My wiki page states I was born in 1968, but we