Fiction
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Leaving a Wake
by Lori Erickson The drone of well over a hundred voices alive with muffled energy skirmished with a warbled recording of “Amazing Grace.” Finely tailored adults mingled and chatted in small clusters around the large hall. Jewelry sparkled; perfume sometimes danced with, sometimes collided with the aroma of freshly cut flowers. An occasional laugh leapt Continue reading
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A Flower, Not a Tree
by Huina Zheng Lin SongBai is a girl, but her name always makes people think she’s a boy. Lin means forest, Song is pine, and Bai is cypress. A fortune teller once said she lacked the wood element, so her parents named her this. She didn’t like it. Her parents tried to comfort her: pine Continue reading
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Cursed Candy
by Jaron Weidner She knew it was wrong. She knew she could get in terrible trouble, but Emily could not stop thinking about the giant bag of candy that her mother had left on the kitchen table. Her eyes glimmered from the moonlight that came through the window above the sink, but her vision was Continue reading
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Two Flash Fiction Pieces by Christina Tudor
Leave Marks Before the car hit us head on, in the liminal space before we both died, we gripped what we could: the steering wheel, the soft seat cushion underneath us, each other so hard our knuckles went white. Before we even had a chance to swerve—our last memory the sensation of lurching forward like Continue reading
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The Final Threads
by Kevin Hogg Of all the days for his car to break down—the hottest day of the summer. Sloan found himself praying for a patch of shade near the road. Sure, removing the trees next to the highway reduced collisions with animals, but it left him nowhere to hide. His water bottle long since empty… Continue reading
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Panda Mitt
by Michael Kozart “Everything’s sold out,” says the sales rep at Sports Bazaar.” She wears a mask with a clear plastic shield like a windshield. “But we’ll order direct from the factory. Neoprene for grip, rainbow hues for fun.” I feel for her, making the sale’s pitch while I sit curbside in air-conditioned comfort. It’s Continue reading
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Sundowning
by Nathaniel Krenkel The green plate rests in my lap. “Imagine how much this would cost in a restaurant.” Under different circumstances, I’d say something rude—the snarky son—but for now, I stay silent and force another bite of the walnut and raspberry buckwheat pancake. “Susie, you’re boy is here,” he says. My mother’s head remains Continue reading
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Firing Sonny Lane
by Mark Connelly Everybody hates Sonny Lane now. The pile-on was predictable from the Joe Rogan interviews to the SNL skits. He wasn’t in R Kelly or Weinstein territory but as cancelled as can be. Not facing jail but enduring the St. Helena of Betty Ford and Dr. Drew mea culpas. He’d always been a Continue reading
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Two Flash Fiction Pieces by Shareen K. Murayama
Where We Grew Up Where we grew up, our mother’s half moon eyes and laughter disappeared in the scissors of the mountains. We mapped her happiness to our father, but directions are just hand-me-downs of where someone’s already been. Where we grew up, they blanketed the lake with a golf course. Blue were our mother’s Continue reading
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At Laurel Lake
by Beth Sherman I study Leila’s body as she swims to the raft. Her strokes smooth and sure, her tan arms a promise. Her body zigs away from the shore, her legs a fluttery moth. She is 13, her head filled with Taylor Swift songs and some boy she met at the mall. September. The Continue reading
January House Literary Journal 