fiction
Your Destination
By Peter Rustin
Thirty minutes ago: the calm droning of the red-eye from JFK to Los Angeles. The cabin lights dimmed. Two teenage sisters sleeping, in pastel sweatshirts, heads nestled, sharing a pair of earbuds linked to an iPhone.
Netherworld
By J. A. Hersh
They were driving straight down a dark road, their little green car bumping on the potholes. It wasn’t a long drive back to their apartment. Fifteen minutes or so.
UNITE?
“Jane, the taste the taste, you have no idea, Jane.” Typing texting toiling tighter to a tik-tok than ever paid to do in an office.
_1981.49.1.webp?alt=media&token=b5ee5c38-bcff-4e40-9509-98313bffed89)
Until My Dying Breath
By Stefanie Lee
I’ll tell you about how I’ve been remembering myself in the silver crucifixes and imaginary cracks of light underneath a centuries-old door frame. About how I find smudges of my soul on everything I touch, bones, dirt, the paper-thin resolve in my hands. It’s dark, you know.
Mrs. Anglerfish
I wake up. The morning sun is seeping in through the closed curtains. What a beautiful day!
A Visit from the Four Great Ones
By Tommy Cheis
Terror. In the sweat lodge. Drumming. Singing. Great Ones whispering.
The Vampire
The vampire was the only nice one at the party. He looked a little out of place, with his long cape and medallion, but very debonair and a little sad. He was standing near the counter dipping pita bread into the baba ganoush.
Milk Carton
Sandy drags Billy with her to evening Off-boarding. Billy’s excited because it feels like a special occasion.
Worknight
I stood and drank underneath the stuttering fluorescent lights and beside my husband Wes, who’d invited me to his office’s Christmas party. I was already halfway to being loaded when his boss caught us by the tree.
Under Branches
By Dylan Reber
There was a tree in our yard. It was our yard just as it had been the yard of the couple who planted the tree and propped it up with stakes so that if it stooped, it wouldn’t stoop too low and die there, leaning sadly toward the grass and its roots.
Fahrenheit S-E-X
By Ken O'Steen
We wore masks when we had sex for the camera, but there were things apparently that could give you away.