“White Summer” by Brian Greene

Danny was a guy who made an impression. When he came into the restaurant to apply for a job as a waiter, a couple weeks before Memorial Day weekend, he did so wearing a flashy suit. I’d been working at the place—a steak and seafood eatery on the top floor of a Holiday Inn at […]

“One-Shot Deal” by R. Daniel Lester

At the yacht club, the dock creaked and swayed beneath my feet. There was brine in the air and the smell of money in my nose. Big money, family money. Ancient dollars that had sired so many other dollars it was exhausted and weary and just wanted to be left alone. I felt about as […]

“Bit Player” by Jim Shaffer

I sat in a small bar just off Broadway somewhere in the fifties. It was my first time there. A cold snap had descended on the city, and I just wanted to sit some place warm, relax, and have a drink. Mellow jazz crept from the jukebox. It could have been Ben Webster. It had […]

“The El Segundo Saga” by Jenean McBrearty

You might say my partner, Ronson, was killed by cherry Life Savers. “These babies helped me quit nicotine,” he’d always say when we had to stop at a drugstore to buy more. And we stopped every night on patrol. He was in Walgreens buying a roll at the same time a punk decided to rob […]

“Make Mine Bloody” by Paul Greenberg

“That woman has the charm and personality of a mackerel. How she makes a living here, I’ll never know,” said Johnny. “And she can’t make a drink for shit. This thing tastes like a bloody nose,” said Bobby. “Hey, what the hell is this anyway?” “A Bloody Mary, extra bloody, just what you asked for,” […]

“Lambs” by Kent Anderson

Farm-to-Market-Road had iced up and it took longer than usual to drive the thirty miles from the dark little farm town of Midvale out to the Old Man’s bleak 640 acres in central Idaho. Even driving carefully, my truck fishtailed on the frozen snow, but I’d learned to keep my foot off the brake and […]

“Riot at the Cattle Prod” by Jim Ruland

The Cattle Prod was packed with every kind of punk in Southern California. Every rowdy boy and reckless girl she’d every partied with was here. Not the actual people per se but the personas they projected, because everybody went undercover at the punk rock show. The sick-of-it-all sons and daughters of dildos and douchebags, each […]

“Border Feud” by Lance Mason

That summer in Oxnard was hot, humid in the mornings, with dew on the grass, and it smelled of the lima bean harvest and the sugarbeet mill out on Wooley Road. Now it was night, just on nine o’clock under a low, lemon moon, and Chuy Muro, in his ’39 Chevy coupe, was pulling across […]

“Rehab” by Martin Goolsarran

The lights stung my eyes as they flittered awake to the clinical glare of fluorescent brilliance. The white walls, blinds, and polished-steel runners on the bed screens gleamed a million dollar smile back at me when my eyes had adjusted to the splendour. The sound of the heart rate monitor ran a steady patter of […]

“The Kick The Bucket Tour” by Jo Perry

The light turned red while the driver regaled her passengers with details of Ramon Novarro’s torture-murder. That’s why the Kick The Bucket Tour’s roofless matte-black van lurched so late from Laurel Canyon, where Novarro lived, into the tangle of westbound traffic on Sunset and forced a motorcycle cop to swerve into the next lane. Oops, […]