From as far back as I can remember our family would spend the summers in the home near Hartford. Every year through the end of middle school I would come home on the final day of class to find the station wagon parked in front of our brownstone, loaded and ready, glowing in the early summer heat. My brother and I crowded into the backseat, our pasty legs knocking together, and our father drove us on past the city limits. I remember watching him with a sort of reverence. He had the face of a boxer, his jawline sharp as glass, and dark eyes that seemed to take in everything and nothing all at once. On these drives he would stop for nothing, his meaty fingers gripping the wheel with a firm tenderness, manipulating it this way and that. He would tap his calloused fingers, a thrumming which drove my mother into a silent fury. I noticed a slight smile on his face as this all transpired.
Fiction, Volume 16 Issue 4
I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
Volume 16 Issue 2
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
Volume 16 Issue 2
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
Volume 15 Issue 5, Contest
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.