Tag Archives: Fiction

by hipacificreview | 11/09/2023 · 5:23 am

Kikiriki Live Poultry, Inc.

by Katrina Dahl Vogl

Cleo has let the Hiss get too loud again. It’s been two days now since she’s had any money, since she got high, and the Hiss is hissing. Saying, it’s time. So an hour ago she caved and called Louie King, and now he’s sprawled out on her bed with his boots still on, whining that Miro said he’d be home soon, right? Cleo doesn’t answer him. He knows just as well as she does that when a dope dealer says fifteen minutes they mean an hour, and when they say ‘soon’ they mean, this’ll take however long it takes. Continue reading →

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Tagged as Fiction, Katrina Dahl Vogl

by hipacificreview | 10/26/2023 · 7:27 am

The Japanese Girl

by Norman Sakai

Back in 1960 when this story takes place, I was Japanese. There’d been pressure since the war for us to say “Japanese-American” but that idea had never grown legs. For one thing, most of us lived in low-income, polyglot neighborhoods like East Los Angeles, where your race — I mean your real race, not some construct — was the most important thing about you. For another, we’d just spent the war in internment camps. The hyphenated term seemed a little pointless after that. Continue reading →

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Tagged as Fiction, Norman Sakai

by hipacificreview | 10/05/2023 · 5:45 am

To Gain the World

by Robert Garner McBrearty

My teenage son says that money doesn’t matter, and on one level I get it, but if you’ve ever been short of it, you know it does.

I point out that we stay in nicer hotels now when we travel, and he admits that’s sort of pleasant, though he says, and I know it’s true, that he’d be fine staying in a hostel. In fact, he might prefer it.

We eat at better restaurants now, I tell him, and he says that is enjoyable, but he’d be fine really with just about any grub, beans from a can, maybe some tuna, and again, I know it’s true for him.

But you wouldn’t want to sleep out on the streets, right? Continue reading →

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Tagged as Fiction, flash fiction, Robert Garner McBrearty

by hipacificreview | 09/07/2023 · 5:31 am

Nooshin and the Forgotten Coast

by Samira Shakib-Bregeth

After she got over her second marriage, Nooshin left Georgia and drove through the Emerald Coast, where her two friends, Brit and Shahin, rent out their vacation homes all year—except for the low season in September when the hurricane season peaks—to Apalachicola, Florida. Nooshin wanted fresh oysters from Oyshack. Chris, who she met in college, wrote about the place east of Highway 30A a month before he went to Rome to find himself.

Twenty years ago, instead of marrying Chris out of college, she married his best friend, Jake, now her first ex-husband. Continue reading →

Valhalla, Georgia

by Stephen Hundley

Crocodiles are easy. People are harder.
–Steve Irwin

In 2006, Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray. The Telegraph reports that he was stabbed hundreds of times by an animal roughly six-hundred-pounds and seven feet across, wing to wing. His cameraman said he passed peacefully, in shock. Continue reading →