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Select All Bicycles
Shaenon K. GarrityProve you’re not a robot, the laptop demanded. Select all images with cars. Selby squinted at the grid of thumbnail photos, feeling a burp of anxiety that summoned sense memories of elementary school math classes. Timed tests, that was the feeling. Three minutes to solve 25 division problems and prove your humanity. The first thumbnail […]
Come Out and Play
Michael Patrick BradyIt was one of those preposterous summer nights when the sun forgot to set. We swarmed through the endless yellowed yards, a dirty dozen of us, defeating countless forbidding fences in pursuit of our prey. We cornered the twins by the Climbing Tree and fell upon them like stones; held one down, the other back, […]
The Fox in the Hydrangea
C. E. SternOnce upon a time, the house next to the cemetery belonged to the only undertaker in town. But we Talbots haven’t been undertakers since great-uncle Laurence got shot in a hunting accident. It’s been just Pa and me in the house ever since. But that’s fine. The house likes it better that way. At least […]
By Train Through the Actinic Mountains
Leigh LovedayA carriage, exposed and burning at the foot of a sheer silver peak. Sunlight, intense sunlight. Smoke. Stillness. Blood. No movement. Then: a solitary figure moving away, stumbling from shadow into light. A change claiming him, deep and irreversible, making him something other. But go back. Trace the train’s journey through this unnatural place. See […]
Suburban Slaughter: Twenty Years Later
Carlos ContrerasThe first thing you might notice when watching Suburban Slaughter is the flashing red thunderbolt on the corner of the screen; the camcorder is almost out of battery, and the characters are almost out of time. It starts with blurred static until a moment of clarity reveals two boys crushed by compression. Their bright shirts […]
The Hand & The Sea
Threa AlmontaserThe Hand At eleven o’clock, with my family tucked fast asleep, I tip-toed to the door and tied the last knot on my combat boot, knots that reached my knees. Rounding the corner, I collided with Baba. “Where do you think you’re going this late?” he asked, rolling the checkered foutah tighter around his waist. […]
CAN I HELP YOU, MISS?
David Landau(Circa 1953) It’s going on full dark when the car turns off the highway into the motel auto court. A ’48 Studebaker Commander careening through one last pothole, running roughshod since Fresno, on fumes since Old Town Calabasas. But it made it. They made it. Just past the red “VACANCY” sign, the car slows then […]
Sandstone Ballad
Danielle EmersonThe statue looked uncannily like her mother. Its nose curved up, stout at the base and plump near the nostrils. Long straight hair fell below its waist; flowy, as if caught in the same wind that brushed against Roadside’s ears. If she squinted, a part of her was so sure that the statue would start […]
