“The Hard Summer That Laura Made Harder” by Brian Greene

I’ll always remember Laura as the woman who made one of the hardest summers of my life harder. It wasn’t enough that the nation-wide recession took its toll on our town and that the restaurant at which I’d been bartending was forced to close, due to lack of business; that I had to turn to […]

“The Best A Man Can Get” by T.L. Huchu

Detective Munatsi watched the electric gate whir shut in her rear-view mirror. It was way too slow. In a city where criminals were given to tailgating, that could be the difference between being robbed or getting away in time. Then again, one often noticed the tell-tale dents on the passenger doors of rich people’s Mercs […]

“Wakes” by D.V. Bennett

The kinds of turbulence people leave behind when they pass through the waters of our lives differ in wild ways. There are those wakes which die out soon, unnoticed when they reach land, and those which make a brief series of rapid spectacular splashes against the rocks, disappearing soon after. There are wakes though, from […]

“Roadkill” by Stephen D. Rogers

After the knife slipped out of my hand, I fumbled for my belt buckle and pulled the thin strip of leather through the loops, screaming to keep myself conscious. The pain. The terror. I didn’t know which was worse or really care. All I knew for sure was I had to stop the bleeding or […]

“The Matter of the Smallgarian Wall and the Portuguese Undertaker” by Steve Levi

Captain Heinz Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes“ of the Sandersonville Police Department, was working on being inconspicuous at the Sandersonville Chamber of Commerce luncheon announcing the inauguration of a new police public relations campaign when he was spotted by Police Commissioner Lizzard who, unlike Noonan, was trying to be as visible as possible. This was hard […]

“Kind of Blue” by Andy Rausch

It was a hot night in The Blue Room, and Junior was really going to town on the trumpet, having his way with his audience. Drenched in sweat and enveloped in thick cigarette smoke, he wrapped up his set with a largely-improvised version of “So What.” The moment he finished, the audience erupted with cheers […]

“Quiet and the Darkness” by Matt Phillips

When you live way out here, there’s all these sounds you hear. I can’t do nothing for you but tell you what they are: The yipping coyote. His howls. The mountain lions growling in the canyons. Them trucks out on the highway. Big tires and chains dragging beneath tractor trailers. Old hoot owl hidden deep […]

“Alex” by Chris Roy

It was trying hard to bite him. For a moment, the lean muscled young man thought the soupy mud had trapped his foot. A sac of cold nerves dropped into his gut, loosening crucial leg tension right as he leapt. His arms stretched thin, grasped a pine bough. Uncertainty protruding from eyes that flashed forward […]

“The Forest for the Trees” by Thomas Pluck

Sirens echoed off the towering oaks of Branch Brook Park. Paulie ignored them. They’d find the wreck soon enough. Cherry blossoms made a white belt across the rolling green. He slid under a bough. The petals left confetti in his hair. Was it this one? He ran his sticky, stained fingers over the bark. No. […]

“Requiem For Spider” by Reed Farrel Coleman

Her heart was lonelier than Sergeant Pepper’s and the whole fucking band. I could see that from across the bar, not that across the bar was like seeing across space and time. It was more like twenty feet and, at that time of night, the view was relatively unobstructed. She had last call girl written […]