Fiction
- Home
- Selections
- Fiction
“Drive” by Aaron Gwyn
They were driving back from Wewoka Lake on the narrow stretch of blacktop east of town. They’d been fighting all morning, and she’d been drinking all morning, and now she was drunk. He didn’t think she was pretty when she was drunk. Her face turned red and rigid. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Charger, staring out her window, and he’d turned the radio off so he could think. All his thoughts were mean and desperate. He couldn’t get them to stop circling. They hit the straightaway right after the curve by the brick plant, trees on both sides, the black oaks leaning so that the road seemed like a tunnel, and the light inside it a strobe of shadow and sun.
READ MORE
“In Lapland” by Christopher Merkner
On Thursday my wife returns from work and says she needs some color in the house, can’t live in this cell-hole another minute, what have we done to bring ourselves to this way of living at our age, we aren’t twenty-five-year-old twits, not anymore. Country Rill is the green she shows me in a magazine. “Look at that,” she says, thrusting the glossy in my face, “and tell me it wouldn’t change everything.”
READ MORE
“The Naked Man” by Geoffrey Becker
I hadn’t always been the Naked Man. While his head was mine—dark, curly hair, glasses, an earnest, somewhat baffled look on a middle-aged face with an almost blue beard line and what I like to think of as a dueling scar on my left cheek (actually, I had a cyst removed there, and the doctor botched the job)—the body belonged to my wife’s former boyfriend, a man with the unlikely name of Garth, who taught earth science at a high school in Ohio. Garth had posed for other paintings, too, but this was the last, and the only one he’d done nude.
READ MORE
“Spring across from West Point” by Emily Doak
The Hudson Line, express or local, runs out of the belly of Grand Central into the light of a graffitied canyon. Weeds vein the concrete gorge, and a valley floor of train tracks pushes forward. Saplings crack whole chunks of concrete loose. Rise further to Harlem, buildings flat to the tracks. Curtains, gray from soot, are sucked out the windows. In apartments completely abandoned, newspaper pasted to the windows has become translucent over time. Vertical rows of windows are blacked out, and diagonal boards warn of elevator shafts in case someone was thinking of walking in from midair ten stories up.
READ MORE
“Confessions” by Tara Mantel
I watch the dead, but not in the way you might think: that is, as spirits, as cold-cloud entities hovering in the corners of rooms said to be haunted, or as they appear in horror films—gray-blue zombies hobbling rancidly down abandoned urban streets or in moonlit cornfields. Rather, I watch the ni of my old and sick ones break down and lose its vitality. I watch until the ni cannot keep wrong thoughts away, until they swirl down from the mind to the soul, already hollowed, as if awaiting them.
READ MORE
“Flounder” by Ted Sanders
Here is the halibut: he lives on the seafloor, swimming on his side, shimmying into the bottom’s silt. He affects flatness. He is meant to work this way. His top side, as he swims, is in truth merely his right side, where both of his close-set eyes now bulge. This top side—his right side, all that he can see of himself—is dark and mottled and always up, and on his milk white left side, always down, nothing remains of his face but the delicate swell of that half of his jaw. And whatever sense of symmetry he has, or of elevation, or orientation, he has learned it for himself because he knows different; he is born upright.
READ MORE
“The Anniversary Trip” by Victoria Lancelotta
They are sitting in a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, not far from the Odéon metro stop, three of them sitting, the wife with her husband, the husband with his mother, not inside the café but at one of the tables on the sidewalk where the prices are exorbitant but the view of the passing crowd is almost enough to counter this. It is November, and Paris should be cold, damp, the sky a low gray sheet, but instead it has been sunny and too warm for the cashmere and corduroy they packed. Their collapsible umbrellas have been useless. The wife—Monica—is damp with an unpleasant sweat most of the time, wet skin cooling at the small of her back and between her breasts every time she stops moving.
READ MORE
“Blackie” by Jeanette Bertles
The radio had said to look for heavy rain. French got the stock in early and was leaning back against the pasture railing when a little red convertible swung in off the road and parked beside his barn. The driver, a skinny woman in tight jeans, slithered out and walked straight toward him.
“Mr. French? How do you do, I’m Katherine Willow and I’ve come to buy a horse,” the woman said, sticking out her hand in such a way that French couldn’t think of anything to do but take it—although not before he’d wiped his own hand down the side seam of his pants.
READ MORE
“In Case Someone Comes Looking for Me” by Becky Hagenston
While her husband is off somewhere getting them new identities,
Liz smokes on the back porch and tries to feel lucky. She’d asked him to change
her name to Daphne—Daphne sounds like a woman who could live in a place as hot
and humid and slow as this, where the plant life is thick and dripping, a place
that’s nothing at all like Tucson. But she isn’t thinking about Tucson or about
The Frenchman, who isn’t even French for God sakes! Who’s as American as she and
Teddy are. She frowns and exhales into a shrub that looks like it wants to eat
her.
READ MORE
“Grand Tour” by Martin Seay
He’ll talk to the girl in the orange knit cap, standing by the Veronese. He won’t look at her at first. He’ll flip to a fresh page in his sketchbook, he’ll glide across the room—his eyes fixed on the painting, drifting close to her, but not too close—and after a moment, he’ll begin to draw.
READ MORE
