by Jason Schwartz | Nov 25, 2013
The gun room has two doors, or three–compare the first, if you please, with the father’s body–and a table painted gray. The parlor wallpaper, from afar, through the garden window, or as it appears in a photograph, torn out one morning from this book or...
by Lou Beach | Nov 14, 2013
Mother packed the box with food for Father’s lunch. The box was very old. There were birds painted on its cover but over the years the paint had been rubbed away, so the birds were almost transparent. I thought that was what ghosts of birds must be like–smudges...
by Adam Schuitema | Nov 4, 2013
Linda Selig opens her hope chest and reaches inside, fumbling beneath the linens and quilts until she finds the plastic baggie full of baby teeth. She winces while shifting her knees over the hardwood floor and then closes the chest in a cedar-laced sigh. There are...
by Jodi Paloni | Oct 27, 2013
The girl inside the black bear costume, whose community service job it was to jump out from behind a tree and terrify little kids at the Forest of Mystery fund-raiser for the nature center, had been stumbling around in the same sweaty suit every night for two weeks....
by Kayla Rae Whitaker | Oct 16, 2013
Dad’s a manwhore. On his first date with Mom, he made her watch a bunch of filthy Betamax tapes with him. She let him. Dad was a banker from a good family. Mom’s dad set the date up. And on rolled the Betamax. Because this was the seventies, I like to picture this all...
by Dustin Hoffman | Oct 9, 2013
A plumber died in the trenches. The red earth caved, made a sucking sound as the cold clay swallowed his knees and then the topsoil cascaded in a sigh. In that first second of his boots sinking, he thought about wet socks. When the ground viced his chest, he imagined...
