Category: Prose
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In the Woods Somewhere
by Sabrina Canepa At first, I thought the smell could’ve been the week-old microwave dinner, something with corn and peas and brined liquid, stewing in the garbage. I thought it could’ve been the garbage in general, sitting next to the side gate, as it had for over a week. The city…
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What Comes Up
by Angela Townsend Everyone is excited about the norovirus. Some people think it starts with negative thinking, or else it wouldn’t be called the “neuro virus.” Some people attribute their immunity to apple cider vinegar, misanthropy, or the Holy Ghost. Some people assume you have the stomach for an unabridged reading of their personal norovirus…
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The List of Gruesome Places
by Mark Brazaitis As a journalist, my father had covered fires and floods. He’d covered bloody protests and a war in the Middle East. When, in February of 1991, he visited me in Guatemala, where I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer, he asked if we could visit the capital’s infamous basurero. He didn’t…
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P. digitatum
by Jean-Luke Swanepoel What about the plants? The bougainvillea, the aloe, and the orange tree, which—sincere efforts notwithstanding—never yielded any fruit. They were all in pots—cerulean, puce—because we no longer had a yard, having scaled down from the house with three bedrooms and a lawn whose hollows we could not manage to fill. Not with…
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A Summer’s Night
by Joel Streicker The flight from San Francisco to Traverse City is delayed, so it’s after 11 pm when we arrive. By the time we—my wife, my kids Rachel and Sam, and I—collect our baggage and sort out the rental car, it’s nearly midnight. But we’re still on West Coast time, so we aren’t sleepy,…
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I’m So Proud of You
by Tommy Cheis Admission standards for suicide bomber school were low. An applicant needed only be pious, unmarried, psychologically healthy, and thirteen years old. And all criteria were waivable. Graduation standards were lower. The technical demands are so minimal and evaluating the mastery of skills under mission conditions so impossible that no student ever failed…
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Frog Diet
by Joseph Charles Mollica Politely as though being watched, Oliver shoved in the same poor excuse for lunch he’d been shoving in for a month, a mostly salad-filled pouch, plus or minus some condiments. He licked the familiar trickle of neon-green dressing clean off his thumb, still unsure that none of his colleagues were watching.…