Backspace by Santino Prinzi
Frustrations typed, vented, deleted unposted. I type fears and hopes on Twitter, and suppress it, gone – no retweets, no favourites. Facebook is the better place for longer outpourings except the...
View ArticleAnonymous by Roberto Carcache Flores
It was my first Thanksgiving abroad. Even the rowdy Spanish tennis players from my dorm had been invited to spend the holidays in a home. My initial instinct was to travel somewhere remote, gray, an...
View ArticleFemale Game Show Contestants by Denis Bell
I love to watch TV game shows. Always have. The long running show Hedge Your Bets is a nightly ritual in my household. My wife and I have watched the show just about every night of our married life and...
View ArticleShowdown in Silicon Alley by Mark Crimmins
We file into a conference room for the weekly meeting. Peter Mathson is going to present us with the new org chart. For the next software release there’ll be a bit of a reshuffle. Bert Pascal sits...
View ArticleEveryone Is Looking at You by Mark Baldyga
You’re not the type of person to go to poetry readings, but tonight you came anyway. Now you’re sitting here, in this café, on this stool, looking for something. The next line to your poem. How does it...
View ArticleChildhood Memories by Carroll Susco
I was alone in the house when the electricity went off. It was very dark. Hurricane Agnes. I was eight. In the basement of what was a two-story Duke, the model name. My mother moved us every five...
View ArticleAll Costs by Geoff Peck
You’re in a dusty bar in western Oklahoma, an outpost at the edge of the Cross Timbers, where the flora turns sparse and freckles the red dirt like an archipelago. The pumpjacks appear as naturally as...
View ArticleFlight by Roxanne Doty
Dale Nelson takes his kids out to Kansas City International airport on Sunday afternoons while his wife works at Katz drugstore downtown. The boy is eight, the girl four. He likes to watch planes...
View ArticleTono by James Guthrie
“Umm. . .” he said, eventually. “Hmm?” “Sorry, my uh. . . my legs, they’re. . . I can’t feel them anymore.” “Oh.” “Can we shift this a little?” “Sure.” “Sorry they’re. . . totally numb.” She put the...
View ArticleOff to See the Wizard by Wayne Scheer
In grade school, Joyce was the good little girl with the starched white blouse sitting in front of the room. But in her mind, she was like Tonya who sat in the back whispering with the bad boys. In...
View ArticleStreet Pizza by Mark Antony Rossi
If your sister only knew the animals she loves are not too bright and often head first for my speeding sedan where their tender bodies are crushed into a thick red paste erupting through a furry matted...
View ArticleThe Lilacs by Kimberly Zook
During their final year of marriage, Maddie set the yard on fire. The lilacs, having bloomed late that May in ’44, banked the clothesline that bore the twins’ cloth diapers, her stained nightgown, and...
View ArticleWeathering by Ken Poyner
The barrel of the pistol presses into my temple and I can feel the anger in the hand that holds it. The barrel does not touch my temple: it seeks to enter, it pushes the scant skin found there into...
View ArticleVIRGIN by Toti O’Brien
“You obey too literally what I say,” he stated, commenting on our inability to get together, do things together, spend time together. Was he asking for more initiative on my side? Was he asking for me...
View ArticleTurkey by Denis Bell
She promised to baste you today, but here you are almost done and she still hasn’t arrived. She visits you often now. Usually before noon, for she has business to conduct in the afternoon and she likes...
View ArticleLandmark by Chad Greene
We’re having a hard time understanding each other. The two walkie-talkies we purchased at Radio Shack, so we could communicate between our separate cars in remote areas without cell coverage during our...
View ArticleBlack Swan by Ken Head
Gare d’Austerlitz. Monday morning, eight o’clock. The overnight from Barcelona pulls in on time. He stares out of the compartment window as if he needs to memorize the scene. It’s raining hard and...
View ArticleAscension by Robert Fisher
Six weeks into a brutal ten-week winter tour of the Midwest, he checks into the Fargo Travel Lodge. The roads are beginning to ice up. He took the bus from Madison, timing his arrival so he could grab...
View ArticleBaby, Baby, Baby by Paul Beckman
“Can’t you shut the baby up?” “Baby is our daughter and maybe if you held or rocked her or even sang to her she’d stop crying.” “Why don’t you do it?” “I do it all the time. Can’t you see I’m using the...
View ArticleThe Good Deacon by Jeff Ferry
Deacon Gordon Lavoy walked into the Shore City Market with long, purposeful strides and grabbed a basket. There was a nearly palpable crackle of energy as every eye in the market followed the Deacon’s...
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