Fiction

Breakfast

By Viccy Adams

Hanging on the wall in the hallway of my parents’ house is a portrait of my great grandparents on their engagement day. It’s one of those typical, non-smiling sepia photographs. He has a massive moustache and her hair is scraped back off her face so hard it must have been painful.

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Man of Glass

By Catherine Almond

I found the police officers in the waiting room; I had been out with a research student whose dissertation I was supervising. My secretary introduced them, Inspector John March and his assistant, Sergeant Howell. I entered my office and Sarah ushered them in behind me. I paused for a moment and then answered the Inspector’s first question.

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The Circle Line

By Bruce J Berger

“I just don’t get it,” said Ellie as she frowned and brushed her long brown hair from her gray eyes. She focused again at the notebook her, flipped some pages, and looked at Martin across the metal table, puzzled. “I just don’t.”

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Goose at the White Feather

By Joanna Campbell

Everything was the same the day they came. The hum of the fridge, the soft voice of the radio, the eight o’clock sun. Same breakfast of warm bagels and fruit. Same headlines about gypsy camps on our people’s land.

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In Here With Us

By Rico Craig

June 18 1999 London
I arrive alone because Gaston doesn’t believe in protests and I don’t believe in him. I’m thinking the guilty thoughts of a person leaving. I walk from Liverpool St tube into sunlight. I can’t explain why I packed a bag and snuck out of the flat while he was asleep.

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Perception >Reality

By CD Mitchell

He walked up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. The house seemed pleasant enough–with red brick along the front and wood siding painted olive green down the sidewalls and on the soffits. But sections of the fascias had rotted and needed replacing. The new coat of paint covered the weathered areas well, however, and gave proof the owners had decided to wait another year before replacing the rotten trim. Randy Johnson waited for someone to open the door while he admired the simple elegance of the home.

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Walkin’ the Dog

By Ted Morrissey

Tom Gest checks the door of Dorm C to make sure it’s secure and he peers through the safety glass. The inmates seem to have settled down. Their orange jumpsuits hang from the ends of bunkbeds like emaciated spirits. There is a faint light coming from the far end of the barricks-style dormitory, from the restroom and shower area. But that is the responsibility of the guard in the surveillance station. Tom pauses for a moment to notice his own ghostly reflection in the thick glass. His dark hair is neatly trimmed, as is his beard and mustache, but there appear to be a few more filaments of white, and the creases around his eyes are deeper set. There is no doubt about it: Tom is becoming his father.

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Entropy

By Kirsty Neary

‘Pure entropy, like,’ he says, dropping words like coins into my ear. He slides back into the seat alongside, the better to keep his face and form in full view of the audience. They’re still cheering and clapping, a few members inching around to the table upon which sits an artful arrangement of his latest chapbook. All those words for a mere five pounds, signed to your specification, if you so wish. I’ve my eyes trained on the half-circle window over the front door of the bar, still flooding a couple meters of linoleum with mandarin light. Summer is coming. It seems important to focus on simple pleasures.

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Dead People I Have Known

By Charlie Taylor

The first was Uncle Tom who committed suicide when I was nine. I heard my father tell my mother about it when he got home from work. I was skidding Dinky toys across the linoleum square in the parlour, crashing them into one another and making childish imitation noises of tortured metal and exploding fuel tanks. He was dreadfully upset about it, I can remember that much.

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Flash Fiction

Holes

By Rosie Adams

Maybe you’d always had them, or maybe there’d been a terrible accident in the fuzzy time of shapes and colours, when your head was soft and couldn’t yet form lasting memories. You assumed that everyone had them somewhere. But the first day at school brought sidelong glances and openmouthed stares.

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Parking Lot

By John Bruce

The area where Bob worked was overstaffed, by about half a dozen people. In abilities, the whole group ranged from the routinely mediocre to the flagrantly nonfeasant, although the tasks assigned were mainly busywork and the number of people assigned to them was large, so nobody could be quite sure who was doing anything worthwhile.

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a note, a blush, a wing

By Defne Cizakca

When I was small, I used to steal from big malls. I would steal erasers with factory smells, pencils embedded with glittering horses, and fluffy pink feathered pen ends. When my mum first found out I stole, she cried and cried and said there was shame on me.

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The Snail

By Brindley Hallam Dennis

Once upon a time in a garden there was a big and very old snail. It had lived a long and dissatisfying life. It had spent many hours in deep contemplation of this perception, standing on the cold wet stone of the garden path in the shelter of drooping hosta leaves.

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Hiding in the Woods

By Matt Greenwood

7 minutes to go until lunch is over. I’ll stay here until there’s two minutes and 45 seconds to go. This will give me the right amount of time to walk directly to my English class, neither too fast or too slow, neither dawdling and conspicuously alone, nor rushing like I might be running away from someone, and walk into class without having to wait for the teacher to let us in.

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Inhabitation

By Graham Guest

Got a babysitter so J and I could go out to lunch for Valentine’s Day, despite the rain. Went well, except for her inhabitation.

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Tommy

By Suvi Mahonen

‘Oh you bastard!’ I slap at a mosquito.
+++++ I straighten and wipe my forehead with the back of my glove and feel mud smear on my skin. Taking off my glove I rub at it. My left thumb feels like it always does. Woollen, dull, thick. Like it’s wearing three layers of gloves on its own.

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Not another Maya Dream That Turns Prosy whilst Shooting Coke with Sigmund Freud

By Lee Sloca

She percolates,
+++ “Mmm… coffee smells dark.”
I drip into the first person,
+++ “Com’ on, cup of jo. Fifteen more minutes; I ain’t nobody. The world doesn’t need me nor will it miss me. Maybe in a couple of hours, I’ll brew myself in the second person. That might perk me up enough to get out of bed; otherwise be a sunshine and lighten my snooze button. It’s cooking outside so it’s best I go back to sleep.”

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Close

By Aimee Wilkinson

I am lying in bed. I am alone and I am listening to you. Through my curtains the morning sun kisses pink on my bedroom walls and casts the room in a rose tinted hue. My breathing is shallow and the cotton sheets caress my naked skin as my chest rises. My hands rest by my sides, my fingers spread wide like starfish on the blue sheets.

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Limbo

By Claire Zhang

Sometimes, in the fickle weather of southern Florida, buttery sunshine will morph into torrential downpour and bellowing thunder. She doesn’t notice the way her room turns into shadowy grays for a while, but then she chances a glimpse. It is then she stares for a moment, enthralled by the beautiful power of the storm, how the rain beats down in thick sheets, slapping the concrete and whipping the plant life; or how the deep-throated rumbles of the thunder make her windowpane tremble with fear.

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Prose Poetry

Remember

By Hugh Fox

“Remember me,” I tell her (4), starting to give her/open up all my albums going back to just-born through grammar and all other schools, Avignon (2 years) and Madrid (3), her mother and aunts and uncles, copies of my poetry books, a print-out bibliography, DVD’s and way-back tapes of my readings and talks, my piano music played on the Steinway over in the Hart Hall at the university, the whole area around her and her little frog-legs filling up.

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No Room to Care

By Dorothy Fryd

The mother in law was coming to stay, which meant there’d be a hole in time. It meant there’d be no room to paint water-colour eyelids or write the plumes of Pompeii dust clouds. There’d be no room to climb stratospheres or wonder at the oscillations between adolescence and manhood. It meant punctuating her monologue with sighs, trying to slip into anecdotes of the odysseys of Icarus and Ithaca.

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The Mother/Son Synapse

By Kyle Hemmings

Driving mother home after the second stroke, past the oaks and hawthorns that lie about their age as if age is ever true, I listen as she talks in fragments, or things that can never be melded except with dream and super glue.

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The Beginning

By Rachael Z Ikins

Earth has held Her breath so many dark months. Her chest aches with this inhalation. Her ribs’ framework tents the snow. Shrinks like a wicked witch. You can hear melt, long sigh’s gurgle– escaping winter.

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IIIIII

By Gabriella Jönsson

On the big stage, finally, with the castle sloping behind us in the rain: we were the audience, and she up there alone just guitar and voice – the tiniest thing – queen of a thousand eyes: whispering Regina.

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A Man’s Fated Garden

By Ron Koppelberger

The bond of perfect happenstance expressed the result of wisdom in degrees of chance. He amended his spirit, the core of his soul with the temperance of everlasting whiskey tumblers and vodka vision. A sober regard for the drink in respite of an eternal drunk.

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The Coolest Science Teacher

By Mark Russell

I forget the topic. Let us say it was fire. Fire and water – though I realise no such topic exists. There, on the front bench, was a fish tank three-quarters full of water. Through it, we could see the blackboard swim. Its formulae swirled and made more chalky sense than before.

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norwich spring

By Emilie Vince

the pinks and whites i bless them; they bless us, strolling hand in hand between cherry trees with the scent of cream emulsion thick in the air, and japanned pink.

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Nonfiction

A Fish Story

By Kurt Caswell

Craig Cass and I were camped at Durbin Lake in Thousand Lakes Wilderness in northern California. It was a moderate 3.5-mile hike in from the Bunchgrass Trailhead under our light packs, packed for a short weekend. We moved easily over the trail through the rolling lava flows, evidence of the recent (about 500 years ago) eruption of Tumble and Hall Buttes.

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Job Interview

By Micaela Maftei

When my mother and father moved they had no stuff. There was no stuff anywhere. No stuff in the refrigerator, no stuff in the closets, no stuff in the car – for the first short while there wasn’t even a car. No stuff whatsoever.

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‘el’ ride

By Elizabeth Reeder

Welcome to the CTA
This is a Purple Line Express to downtown
Doors closing
Central is next
In the direction of travel doors open on the left at Central
+++++ the sound of the tracks, the vibration as we set off, the sound of air coming through +++++ vents, the train rocking as we hit speed

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Never Marry Your Prom Date

By Thomas Sullivan

The water in the hot-tub is circulating an off-white sheen of bubbly foam, which floats around the tub like a pollution slick in a river eddy. The only thing missing from the scene is a fish floating upside down, but the guy across from me, who keeps nodding off and jerking awake, might go under pretty soon and fulfill this role. I’m trying to ignore the chemical stench when the woman sitting next to me strikes up a conversation.

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Foreword

By Laura Tansley

Away from home I feel braver, so I indulge him when he asks did my brother and I fight a lot as children. He has a handsome Italian accent and a smooth beard. His satchel is heavy with copies of a free magazine, it looks as if it would split him in two like a block of wood. I won’t take a copy though, I have enough to carry.

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