Category: Prose
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The Zoo
By Eli Coyle It was a late Saturday afternoon, the last whispers of February drifting away, and the Zoo was alive, a cacophony of youthful chaos. Not a literal zoo, but the name we bestowed upon our apartment complex, an ecosystem thriving with untamed twenty-somethings running wild, fueled by the heady mix of drugs and…
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A Short Tail
By Martha Hipley The tail first appeared before her thirteenth birthday and grew in at the base of her spine, right above the cleft of her backside. Her mother told her that this was normal. Her grandmother complained that she was too young—maybe it’s all the hormones in the milk, she said. In any case,…
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The Farmer Wears the Crown of Thorns
By Richard Wirick If you wish to supplant someone, to substitute yourself for them, could wishes be little waves, partial causes, small curling waters like the ones Roger fished in through the rivers flowing north to Erie, the inland sea that could create or be created from anything—glaciers, ice-swales, beginnings and endings of ages before…
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An Existential Question
By Robert McGuill His cousin was what to me? Exactly? An ex-niece…in-law? I was her mother’s brother-in-law until I divorced her mother’s little sister, my ex-wife, Marie…plus, I worked for her dad in his body shop one summer when I was twenty, so that made me something too, I suppose— I don’t know. You think…
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Heat Visions
By Damieka Thomas That summer, we were living in Grandma’s old run-down trailer in Olivehurst, California, which Mama deemed Meth Capital, U.S.A. It was painted an ugly off-white with sky blue trim. For months, there was no shower because the trailer was under construction that never seemed to end since our uncle from the Bay…
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Ithaca
By Bryan Price [] As the interview was winding down, she ran her hand through her hair distractedly and asked if I’d ever met him—Jean Dagault. I said, once, in Ithaca. She asked me what it was like and I said what was what like? Meeting him or what was he like? She said both or…
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Body Doubles
By Katie R McKay I’ve always hated the spring, but it’s the time of year I’m most prone to falling in love. When I think back to that spring, I think about so many things, things like the balmy weather, the day drinking, the rolling nature of the days, one blurring into another in a…
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Indio, California
By Britt Astrid Alphson There is a viciousness about it, Indio. Bark scorpions and the collapsing of breath, of time, of anything besides a careening sort of heat. The Morongo Casino Resort juts from the soil like some beckoning reptilian creature: the older patrons with their rotting teeth, acres folded upon acres of fuck-you-green putting…