Category Archives: Fiction

Every Weekend

by Mariah Rigg

For Papaya, the weekdays of summer are filled with the garden. She and her mama plant cosmos, pick mangoes, watch the chunkily ridged black-white-and- yellow-striped caterpillars curl and uncurl themselves into inching balls, devouring milky crownflower leaves, weaving themselves into chrysalides, so that they can break out as delicately feathered Monarch butterflies. Some days are sprinkled with sun, sand, and salt. Other days they pick flowers on the edges of the brown, dirt trails that run through the green ridged mountains. On the steamy, lazy days they lie in the rectangular shade of the tin carport and read aloud from the Chronicles of Narnia. Continue reading

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Widow’s Walk

by Rebecca Keller

1 The Mother, 1996

Yolanda fussed in her playpen, working up to a howl. Maria launched herself out of the chair like an awkward pole-vaulter. Her belly was heavy, and the sweat trickling between her breasts felt like an insect in her bra. Being pregnant the first time had been easy. Yolanda had been small and light, floating easily in her middle, light and calm. Continue reading

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Cloisters

by Eva Lomski

a fuk a fuk a fuk

She wished she knew the species of tropical bird in the palm tree making that call, because she wanted to pin a medal to its chest. Late afternoon, just as the sun disappeared from the pool, and champagne corks were heard popping all over the resort, a fuk a fuk a fuk it called, tiredly, plaintively, to a potential rival or mate.

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Winnie

by Karl Luntta

He sat on a fallen palm tree on the beach, dazed, the pain in his ankle peaking, maybe turning the corner. He’d already begun to think of it as a foreign thing, not part of his body, no danger to him, nothing to worry about. At least he’d begun to will it so. Out here in the middle of nowhere, no doctor, nurse, no clinic on the island, things could go south quickly, and with little flourish.

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The Night You Lost Your Pension

by Joshua James Jordan

The basketball hoops are folded up into the gymnasium ceiling to make room for half of a rusty airplane serving as the centerpiece for the homecoming dance. The shop class had brought it in piece by piece, and the lights strung through it change from purple to blue to green to—now you know where the budget for your raise went. You’re only chaperoning as a punishment after that bitchy assistant principal caught you teaching class while hungover, but, hell, it was a Friday, and you’d used up all your sick leave already, and the substitutes are all idiots anyway.

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