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“The Fourth Wall” by David Tucholski
There is a stick in the ground with a cardboard sign taped to it. A man, who is not an American but wears one of their uniforms, reads the sign aloud for those who are illiterate: “If you cross this line, you will be shot!”
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“One Act” by Micah Nathan
Ben first met Charlie Cahill on the train to New York. Charlie was reading a collection of Hemingway stories; he wore a wrinkled suit that showed too much sock, and he gorged himself on a hot dog, oblivious to the ketchup that dripped down his tie. Behind Charlie sat a young mother with her crying child. After ten minutes of wails and screeches, Charlie turned around, dangled his keys, and grinned.
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“Civil Twilight” by Timothy Hedges
If Augie hadn’t been standing next to the man, he’d have sworn the noises came from a creature covered in fur, a bear, perhaps, or a moose. It was far from the imperial voice he remembered booming throughout his father’s bus, announcing the cross streets at each stop: Van Dyke, John R. In that vision, Augie was the kid sitting by the door, trying to catch his father’s eye, proud that the man in uniform with his hands firmly turning the wheel was his dad.
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“Ice House” by Kate Blakinger
I catch my husband using one of my eyeliners to color in the spot where part of his eyebrow is missing, a scar from the accident three months ago. Mark snatches his hand away from his face. “Don’t you knock!” he says, his words clipped and his voice dipping low. I would have knocked, if the door hadn’t been open a crack.
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“Brief Lives” by Paul Zimmer
I’ve given the slip to those creeps in the geezer asylum across the road and tip-toed out the emergency exit when they thought I was taking a nap. It’s Friday evening in Squires Grove, and Burkhum’s Tap is crowding. I’ve staked myself out early at the bar and had a few Leinenkugels.
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“Imago” by Andrew Peery
Raphael wonders what butterflies eat, but he is only seven, and there is no one obvious to ask. His older brother, Ortiz, says everyone knows in the fifth grade. A swollen-faced teacher with moles on her neck carries a wooden case from room to room, showing the few monarchs that the supply-closet roaches have not eaten. The teacher is heavy, and she carries her chest on the flat glass of the lid, white-coated arms out in front and the scarred wood frame of the box beneath her, balanced on the roll of her stomach. She stands unconsidered and comfortable. “Today, children, we are going to talk about the things I really love.” Laughter peals through the room as twenty-five fifth graders think about female anatomy.
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“Chicago” by John Fried
Two college seniors sit in a café in a Midwestern college town. Crowds of people pour in to escape the snow. The boy and girl know each other well, and they don’t. They have been together for seven weeks. Their understanding of each other centers on past love lives, confusion about the future, and a vast exploration of each other’s bodies. They need something to move the relationship forward, or it will die.
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“Philadelphia” by Kurt Rheinheimer
But here, in the white chair where he sits every evening, he could be on the bench between innings, waiting to hit or to jog back out to center. Anything in the world could happen just now, is what he feels when he is in the chair, when the lawn is wet and the golden color of early evening surrounds him as if it could be youth itself. You don’t hear the car horns, the yellow air is easier to breathe, his tall wood fence at the back blocks the view of the alley, the loud skinny young people with all colors of skin and their pants falling down and their hats on sideways don’t look as dangerous. His yard somehow holds it off, the onslaught he knows will kill him before anything else does.
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“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.
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“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.”
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