Category Archives: Fiction

Watching the News

by James Hartman

I stood at the window, still watching those bare limbs on that birch tree along the slope of bright snow in the dark because I wanted to believe I saw one flutter a little red.

“Oh, Jonathan,” my father called.  “It’s there, right?  One has finally come?!”

Cardinals were my father’s favorite animal.  When they were younger he and his brother used to set bird feeders throughout their backyard, strategically placed according to what they had learned from their Audubon book.  My father always talked about them.  He always believed they meant the return of something.
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Signs

by Scott Ortolano

The shadows cast by the tall trees seemed to mock them with the illusion of coolness in the simmering Florida afternoon. A constant drone of singing cicadas, or what his Uncle Rupp called a swamp chorus, was only broken here and there by the rustle of lizards startled into saw palmettos by this pair of mid-afternoon intruders. Nothing else stirred—or would for hours. Continue reading

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The Feline Scale

by Lisa P. Sutton

I’m hiding in my car thinking about Demi Moore again.

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I Hate Everybody

by Alice Kinerk

Chase was standing by the whiteboard in his fourth-grade classroom, banging his math book against the tray at the bottom, where his teacher kept Expo markers. He’d discovered if he wailed hard enough, if he spread his stance and put the textbook above his head and brought it straight down again, like his gramps used to do with an ax, he could make the markers jump. Chase made it his goal to make the markers jump so high they would fall out of the tray. Continue reading

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For a Limited Time Only

by Laurel DiGangi

Nathan was restless. He’d been waiting far too long with nothing to occupy his mind. No phones, zines, or screens. No landscape either: just an endless grassy knoll and sluggish queues of naked people extending to the horizon. The sun, or some other glowing orb, had not budged since he arrived an hour, week, or year ago.

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