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 3

Local Bears

I ride in an unfamiliar SUV through my old neighborhood. Two people are in the SUV with me. One of them drives. Through the window I can tell that there is something going on in the middle of the city. There might be snow, I can’t remember. The SUV parks at the edge of a cul-de-sac, a place where the residential road intersects a larger street. I can see a traffic signal from where we park. It is just outside the neighborhood’s reach. We move a little farther down the street. We park again. We get out of the car. I feel that one of my companions tells me that someone has lost a bear. It is running wild. It is also a grizzly bear. The most dangerous bear. I hear it from their mouth. It is what they tell me. It could be a Montana bear or a Wyoming bear, or a local bear. The last is unlikely. I have seen those bears and they do not exist.

In Dialogue with a Mirror

MAN: And even Hegel once said that there are some people—that within them the will of history has been instilled so deeply, like a parasite, like a spirit, that the brain’s crevices turn from flesh to stone, and it is within this burning pumice, within the heated, boiling rock, that man is no longer man, cannot consider himself man, no, more than man—to be the man and the world in one breath. They say if the world could write, it would write like Tolstoy.

A Dark Fire is Kindled in Phoenix

Watching the videos from a safe place,
I’m struck not just by the crowd but by how it moves,
how it swarms to the front like flies to a corpse and churns about in agitated delirium.
It’s all so Bacchic, in its frenzied ecstasy and cultish ritual, or even Lovecraftian;
I half-expect the crowd to start chanting to Cthulhu any minute now.
But the only Elder God this cruel spectacle honors is standing on the podium,
and he speaks in a tongue far less esoteric,
one leavened with a thousand primal appeals and playground slurs.