Category: Stories
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Five Years
Adam Moorad
Reuben dreams a dream. He is in his office alone with the lights out. A buffalo is eating the carpet, chewing, coughing a laryngitic cough in the dark. Reuben sits at his desk. The office is a dry place and Reuben feels dried-out. Smoke detectors make red constellations across the ceiling. Reuben looks around for…
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The Chemistry of Objects
Amber Sparks
Exhibit 5WW: Metal Canister. Discovered at Majdanek, 1944. The casual observer may, at first glance, mistake the canister behind the glass for a dented coffee can. The label is almost entirely gone, the faded gold paper clinging in shreds to the flaking, rusted metal. But if the visitor looks closely at the largest shred they…
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Dogs and Refugees
Yvette Ward-Horner
They came at night, with long black guns, while she slept beneath her mosquito nets — stretched on her back with a type of abandon that would soon be lost to her forever. In the morning, it was over and she crouched in the stairwell, listening to grown-up whispers, knowing that something had changed the…
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Herman and the Elephant
S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
Herman played with his G.I. Joes in the backyard. Technically, he played with his Cobras in the backyard because he only had the bad guys, the bad guy base, the bad guy vehicles. He liked the bad guys best. The good ones were so normal looking, Duke the blonde-headed leader so like Chad Simpson, who…
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of wood
JA Tyler
Dark skies today he says and she says I love the look of clouds and it has been so long since she has said anything that he isn’t sure how it all works. He sits. He stands. He turns around and closes his eyes and opens them and she is sitting there, her knees above…
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who stormed the beaches
David Erlewine
S Even though I’m silent, my mom puts her finger against her lips as Dad yells. He’s upstairs at the front door, directly above us, yelling I hope at neighbors, not investigators. They’ve been in front of our house for at least five minutes. The basement Mom and I are hiding in smells like wet…
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Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Shellie Zacharia
She hated mountain driving. The mountains might fall, snap, at any given moment, rocks and dirt and trees tumbling. Or maybe just a shift, a closing in, the mountain sides narrowing the road, so that she held her breath, curve and curve again, nausea building. He didn’t seem to mind. He drove fast, confident, and…
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May This Strap Restrain You
Anne Valente
It started so easily, a single October second, the movement of tendons and bones that felt habitual within Thomas’s hands, not theft but an action without judgment, nothing more than the transfer of metal and leather from one dark place to another. It was something others could have done at no expense, the kind of…
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Save Me
Michelle Reale
It lasted only a few moments. When I surfaced there were soft murmurings. I wore the only good dress that I had, a purple pastel with little sea pearls sewn around the collar. My husband went under after I did. I wanted to be first person he saw when he opened his eyes. I wasn’t,…
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Slime Me
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop. He invited his best friend Elmer to…
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Fraud
Erin Fitzgerald
Skimming Jason called me last June. I owed him two thousand bucks — party favors for graduation bashes. I had too many friends when I was in school. Jason wasn’t calling to party. I could’ve kept avoiding him. But he called instead of showing up, so I figured I’d try reason. Jason’s big, but he…
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Family
Jensen Beach
Someone suggested swimming and someone else said that in this weather all we need is another incident. Someone recalled that there was an expression that perfectly explained this very moment. Someone said that yes they remembered it, lightning doesn’t strike twice, and someone else said that as a matter of fact that’s happened to a…