Category Archives: Fiction

Kindness and the Divan

by Paula Eglevsky

Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever is not kind has no faith.
– Muhammad

Moya Tetushka’s house had a parlor that was always cold.  The curtains rustled and the shadows in the room changed from dark to darker throughout the day.  There were odds and ends in it; mismatched furniture, peacock feathers, and plastic ferns that seemed alive.  The family used the parlor for special occasions like birthdays, when they stood around cakes made of carrots, or holidays, when napkins were folded into tulips.  Fanny remembered being at her aunt’s house during Easter.  She didn’t mind the curtains moving on their own, or how the rug had tea stains.  Auntie Moya kept caramels in the parlor and Fanny ate them, kneeling on a sofa that looked like a chair mushed into a bed. Continue reading

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Elegy for an Artist

by Elaine Fiedler

It was known as the MacKenzie touch—the portrait painter’s knack for capturing the perfect luminous moment of his subject’s life. I was lucky. I knew the great John MacKenzie. Continue reading

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On to Stockton, 1930

by Renee Agatep

“I must have danced 90 foxtrots tonight.” Irena lit a cigarette just outside the door of The Liberty. “Can’t you do a rhumba or a waltz sometime?” Continue reading

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Dragon Run

by Bronwyn Hughes

The rusty Texaco star clung to its pedestal above Main Street, welcoming me back to my hometown. Beneath, a brightly painted visitor center had displaced the long-defunct filling station where we used to smoke cigarettes. Were they expecting tourists? I strained to see the bones of Mobjack Courthouse under a veil of self-consciously cute updates, like sidewalk bump-outs planted with native seagrasses.

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Telling Stories to Myself

by Audrey T. Carroll

The scurrying upstairs sounds strange now, like a million things it isn’t. There are squirrels for certain—I’ve seen them escaping onto our roof like they’re emerging from some portal to another world. There are heavier creatures, too. Our best guess has always been racoons, but how they get in and out I couldn’t say. No matter how much they all skitter and thump around, no matter how many times they make me jump in the middle of the night when I think I’m utterly alone, I haven’t got the heart to call an exterminator. Or maybe that’s just another story I tell myself. Maybe I’m just afraid—afraid of the weight of silence, afraid of hearing the ghosts that linger. Continue reading

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