Category: Prose
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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.…
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Dumped
by Mark Brazaitis The first time one of Adrienne’s boyfriends ended the night in a dumpster was an accident. His name was Rupert, and besides his talent for riding a unicycle while wearing a Cat-in-the-Hat hat and his ability to speak spontaneously in rhyme, a quality Adrienne at first found charming, he wasn’t good…
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To Beauty From Beast
by Alaina Hammond I was in you from the very beginning, though it took me years to fully emerge. I let you have your childhood in relative health. I even let you have your daughter, sparing her in every sense. You staved me off as best you could, to starve me even as I starved…
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Lightning Bugs in January
by Derek Updegraff She imagined Harry, Hermione, and the rest of the gang squealing as the flames colored the gray sky. Her mom had said, “Toss them in. Go on, Becca. Toss them in.” So she tossed them in seconds ago, not hesitating because she knew better than to defy her mom. Her hands stung…
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Bitter to Ripe
By DM Anderson I was twelve years old the first time I uttered the words son of a bitch. Naturally, I had no idea what those words meant. I was merely a child. I only knew the expression came with a sinister adult-sized connotation. That same year was also when I decided to move my…