Fiction, Volume 16 Issue 4
Allison Wallace
It's Not For Everyone PT.IV

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.

It's Not For Everyone PT.IV
Volume 16 Issue 2
Sky Ford
Dreaming in a Mundane World

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.


Dreaming in a Mundane World
Volume 16 Issue 2
Jules Dubel
The Psychic Moles from Outer Space

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!

The Psychic Moles from Outer Space
Volume 15 Issue 5, Contest
Skye Caldwell
Jackalope

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.

Contest, Volume 15 Issue 5
Albert Kerelis
Empty Cassettes

The first time I watched my dad climb up on the roof, I was 11 or 12. "You stay down there and take my phone, so if I fall and break my neck, you can call the paramedics." I think of that every time I climb up. Who's waiting at the bottom for me?

Volume 8 Issue 2

Portrait of a Summer Day

A young man sits alone, his large frame taking up the driver’s side of a cherry red 2005 Honda Element. Hand pushing down on the left dial of a broken radio, the familiar chords of "Life in the Fast Lane" sputter out to fill the vacuum of trapped heat and closed windows. The car is warmed by an unrelenting Sonoran sun that refuses to notice that the AC has been broken for months. His body arches forward; a streak of balmy sweat left on the seat clings to the drenched fabric of his white t-shirt, unable to part in the car’s sweltering interior. Sinew and tendon bulge below umber skin, fingers pound the steering wheel, their glistening marks coating the boiling vinyl resin. With each downbeat, shining black hair leaps from his head—chin bobbing up and down, eyes tightly closed, fingers bounding between dashboard and wheel. The scene is almost religious in the singularity of the man’s fixation.

Reflections of a Wanderer

Dear Juniper,

I wonder if you, too, ever find yourself caught in late night cycles of bittersweet recollection of the months we spent together, and, after drifting through a night of sleepless longing, you wake up to a world that appears colorless and muted in comparison to the world we shared. But perhaps I am just imposing my own experience onto you. I still feel your presence stirring within me, and the truth is, I hope that you do feel the way I do, that I haven’t already become irrelevant. Those months where we roamed from farm to farm across Europe, wild adventurers with only each other to rely on, were a time of utter liberation and personal discovery for me. I felt, essentially, happy.

The Golem

And with the spoon of creation he stood, bending over banks of the river, carefully placing spoonfuls into the casket. The soil—white, burning bright, bleached, sucking in desperately with its porous, speckled mouths the skin of the Rabbi, sensing the Hebrew blood that coursed within. It clung tyrannically to his hands, merging in with his flesh to the point that his blood began churning, swooshing, pulsating, crashing, buzzing, blasting to the rhythm of the primordial earth. The river water, stopped to the point that it began to run backwards, forming little cancerous pools along the banks under his feet.