Fiction

Any City

Any City

♦
Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦
Mom came downstairs, her eyes looking like she’d been crying all morning. I was still in bed, in the unfinished basement that was now my room. The leggings under my sweatpants itched. She barely ran the heat anymore. Getting out of bed meant getting ready for work—putting on the yellow…
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Far Post

Far Post

♦
Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦
My lip is swollen like a bee sting. On the inside it keeps rubbing against my braces, sore. All I can think about is the salty flavor of the cut in my mouth, and I’ve been late to every class, my mind wandering down the hall, sucking on this sore.…
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The Hunt

♦
Issues, Spring 2019 ♦
When he asks “Shotgun?” it takes her a second to realize he’s not wondering where she wants to sit in the truck, but what weapon she wants to bring. Lizzie wrinkles her nose. He knows she doesn’t like guns. “Bow,” she says, and yanks on the door. She has to…
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Smart House

♦
Issues, Winter 2019 ♦
Maxine knows there’ll be trouble the minute she sees the black bear roaming her front yard, a shadow in the drab morning light. It’s small, a youngster, with a chest blaze, and it munches from an ash bush still laden with late fall berries. Thirty-six years on this earth, in…
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The Elk

♦
Fall 2018, Issues ♦
after “The White Horse” by Yasunari Kawabata In the low light of the gloaming he felt the pulse of the late evening in the cutting wind. It broke around the branches and tree trunks as it slid down the mountainside into the valley where he found himself standing, his knees aching.…
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Surface Level

♦
Summer 2018 ♦
It was Cecil Leemaster’s favorite time on the lake. He’d make his first excursion a few days after Thanksgiving, cruising his bass boat along the resurrected creek channel, following the route of old Highway 7. The late fall drawdown of Cedar Lake by the Corps of Engineers left the twelve mile Burgey’s…
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Second Coming

♦
Winter 2018 ♦
I had known all my life the world would end with the new millennium, that Jesus would return and save the faithful and leave the wicked, and that girls who didn’t want to be left behind had better behave. I knew this because my father told me, me and the rest of the congregation at the Little Martha…
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This Must Be the Place

♦
Fall 2017 ♦
The clouds overhanging the horizon are the color of coal, and beyond that clot of shadows William can see veins of coursing light–but he spares them no thought. For now there is only the pale sky above and the highway like dark and yellow-lined water passing beneath the old convertible as…
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