Category Archives: Fiction

The Tourist

by M. Anne Kala`i

Naiwi’s first and only visit to the mainland nearly burned him down. Desperate to escape the island that knew him better than he knew himself, he sold what valuables he could scrape together from distracted vacationers and his cash-strapped family, and lit out for California. Continue reading

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Roadkill

by Jean-Luke Swanepoel

When I was five and fretful, my uncle was the kindest man I knew. Until I watched him run over a dead raccoon on that road to the mall on the outskirts of town. During summer it was a road through a field of green stalks, but it was winter and the fields were barren. He swerved firmly to make contact with the pile of blood and bones which passed like a hiccup beneath the wheels.

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Floaters

by Karen Regen Tuero

Johnny helped me move out of our apartment, the one I’d found us two years and one month earlier. It was a decent-sized studio on Bleeker before it hits the Bowery, affordable only if shared, at nine hundred a month, if you can believe rents were ever that cheap. New bamboo floors, high ivory ceilings, potted snake plants in the lobby where an elevator conveyed noiselessly.

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A Tomb by the Sounding Sea

by S. Holt

Aunt Fran had called with my mother’s death announcement. She was barely intelligible, blubbering into her phone, her tears probably clogging the buttons and ports. “She ran the car in the garage,” she sobbed. “Nothing they could do, just kept her on life support until last night.” She swallowed, collected herself. “They think your father really did take her in right away. Tried CPR. Which almost makes it harder to take.”

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Memories

by Fabiana Martínez

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.

Plato, Phaedrus, 274c-275 b, Reginald Hackforth, transl., 1952.

 

“You will have to sign page four and make three copies. One for us, one for you and… I’m confident they will require one at the funeral home, Sir,” the big blonde hospital administrator with one missing fake nail pronounced matter-of-factly. Continue reading

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