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 9 Issue 2

On the Habits of Coyotes

My girlfriend tells me we’re haunted by dead coyotes. In a blue room in a grey house in Milwaukie, we cut up t-shirts I can’t fit in anymore and M tells me she can hear the ghosts howling.

“That doesn’t really sound like a coyote,” I say when she makes the noise for me, an eee-eee-eee sort of noise that sounds more like a dolphin than a phantom coyote.

“I’m not doing it right—do you hear it now? It’s there,” and she stands on the stacked foam mattress toppers to see out the window.

The summer house is at the edge of Johnson Creek, a three bedroom rental two blocks from a TriMet station. We spend weekends in the sun, smoking joints and pulling the house from swelling vines of blackberry and clematis. They root into the grey frame and I’m worried one day the earth might swallow the house whole.

Big gulp.

“It’s probably just the Gold Man,” I tell M when she won’t stop looking out the window.