Category Archives: Fiction

Dormitory

by Michael W. Cox           

The Eagle’s Nest occupied the third floor of an old factory. Boys walked up wide steel stairs to get there, past dirty windows showing old looms on the first floor and bald manikins on the second, the building shaped like a box. The men’s dormitory was built like an E lying on its back, with entryways lining its interior, streets running three sides of it, and a dumpster-filled alleyway behind, where vagrants slept at night. On the plaza outside the dorm, protesters marched against the war. Long hair, scraggly beards, blue jeans, black boots—you couldn’t tell them from the vagrants. Continue reading

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Cold Majuro Snow

by Darren Dillman

Enni Bilimon, the last Marshallese survivor of the Castle Bravo nuclear test, steps off the chipped concrete porch and maneuvers around the papaya and pandanus trees and sees the children dancing on the beach of the lagoon, swirling with their arms spread out, mouths open, faces tilted toward the clouds, catching with their tongues the first cold flakes of snow in Majuro’s history, spinning and hopping on little black and brown feet and yelping and hollering with the boys shirtless and the girls wearing floral-patterned homemade dresses called guams and dancing because, to them, the snow is something to celebrate. Continue reading

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rodeo reprieve

by Collette Grace

My mother’s nightgowns are thick, heavy to the touch, swamping me when she leans down to kiss me goodnight. Well-loved fabric built to last the abuse of a thousand bedtimes, coated in the ghosts of her grandmother’s perfumes. Continue reading

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Folded Flag

by N.C. Miller

When Amelia Birch limped up to her late husband’s burial service wearing a walking cast and dragging a sledgehammer, the crowd gasped and the minister stopped preaching. She’d been in the car accident that killed her husband a week before – that much was known – but she was released from the hospital the same night and hadn’t been seen since. There’d been a lot of talk as to what happened and why she’d skipped the funeral. So, when she showed up at the cemetery, dressed for church but looking angry, she had everyone’s full attention. Continue reading

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The Roommate From Somewhere Else

by Zoran Ernjakovic

Brian’s new roommate arrived three weeks into the semester, dragging nothing but a small silver cube that hummed when you got too close.

“My name is Zyx,” he said, extending a hand that gripped just a beat too long. “Pronounced like ‘zicks.'”

He was clearly an alien. Continue reading

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