PICKLE By Ric Hoeben There was river birch and there was lilac and then there was first base. Or at least the hole where first base once sat in the red, soft earth had kept, and Scoop stood about and remembered something of it. And so, also, had he tread the layout of land and … [Read more…]
MAGALÍLUISMILI By Paul Kavanagh After many months in a dull hotel room on Strait Street, Valletta, I concluded that I had arrived too late, too late to write an old-fashioned account of travel. Half asleep, I had journeyed through Malta. I drank too much while in quest of something elusive in Saint Paul’s and Saint Julian’s. I … [Read more…]
DATING AND NON-EXISTENCE By DJ Swykert I would rather buy something than sell anything. So it was natural I hated pitching my book to an audience. But I have become accustomed to certain luxuries the affluence designing weapons of mass destruction has afforded me. I absolved the building of these weapons by writing The General … [Read more…]
LAKE BEULAH By Anthony Roesch In Lakeland, most mothers warn their children to keep away from the lakes. Sink holes and pancaking, cottonmouths and alligators, just to name a few reasons. But my mother. Unlike most. Didn’t care. Lake Beulah, punchbowl and reedy, sometimes coffee-colored, sometimes gunmetal gray, notorious for swamp gators and cat drownings, … [Read more…]
TRAIN By Jill Stukenberg I imagine her emerging from the house to a bright day. Keys, wallet, coffee mug in hand—and the sun like lighting for a surgery. Eyelids fluttering, pupils shrieking with shrink, her gaze would have escaped to the black bulk of the train engine parked behind the shed. By then it had … [Read more…]