Fiction

Image Credit: Holly Birtles, C1 Monsters Isle of Grain, Digital c-type print (2020)    hollybirtles.com You should not bother to read this. You should likely close this book, and put it…

* * * They arrive a few minutes earlier than anticipated, deviating from the embossed schedule that sits crumpled within my hand. The sound of them slicing across the horizon…

They were reading again. They were reading, and they were waiting. Waiting by the lake. “Lacuna” they read aloud, “Latin for a missing book, or a cavity in bone.” They…

Through the window I can see clear across the alley into the apartment facing mine. Mrs. Finch reclines in her armchair by the window, a hand raised in greeting. Rain…

Stone Cold Plumbers  During the first week of the second month at our new house, the sewer line busted. We were forced to use the bathroom at a nearby Dunkin…

Porterhouse, Texas   No one living had known the dead. The cemetery was so old, it was aempty. When we were fifteen-years-old, we’d skip school on Fridays and smoke weed…

MORE THAN NOT-SWEEPING Behind us there were sand dunes, and on the sand dunes were tufts of brown grass which made me think of those almost-bald men who thought that…

At first, the park-goers welcomed them, fed them, even. The Canada geese were a pleasant diversion from the local wildlife that made up the ecosystem of Stony Lake Park—a harmonious,…

My brother is a superstar. Dad says I could learn a thing or two from him. He says if I stop giving every sad sack I meet a hand-carved spoon,…

* * * You hold your clenched fist out to me, palm up, fingers wrapped around an unseen object. I hold your gaze as I unwrap them, one by one.…

[Image collage: “The Skin That Dies”] I found the Craigslist ad when I first showed up in Phoenix, in those early days that were spent scouring the internet, waiting for…

* * * And I wish for a moment, a moment to breathe. There is my teenage son, his knee bouncing under the kitchen table; my father, calling voicelessly for…

Stockholm, 1998: Max Martin’s bare foot is on the sustain pedal of his new upright piano, the only piece of furniture in his small, dark living room. The three notes…

Five months after the Rapture, Jake lives on a Florida beach in his twenty-foot travel trailer in a constant fog. “Watch your head,” he says to the stranger he’s invited…