by Alice Cross
Ethan escapes as soon as Russell erupts. He remembers to grab his jacket, so he should be okay later when the temperature drops.
He knows what he would see if he dared to look back: their parents frozen in fear and shame. This bullying boy is their son, the product of their union. They await what they see as their due, their punishment for somehow failing him. Soda has been thrown in their faces. They will be grateful it was not the can. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
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.
Filed under Fiction
by Georgea Jourjouklis
“July eighth, noon,” Curio said into the voice recorder on his phone. “Targets A, B, C, exit their Honda after four days away from the primary location.”
He raised a pair of binoculars—a cheap, dollar-store brand his grandmother gifted him a few Christmases ago—then peered through the window at his neighbours across the street. The hot July sun beat down on his face. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction, Young Writers Edition
by April Bannister
When her heart buys its ticket and packs its suitcase and settles in its window seat to watch the airplane heave up from the soil, she is at home—she has not yet laid in her hospital bed, nor stepped on an airplane herself. When her heart buys its ticket, she feels it, chloroform cold radiating from inside her chest. She panics. Hands clutch at something too deep to grasp, so she flails, alone in her bedroom, alone in the apartment. I can’t die yet, she thinks. There’s so much food I need to eat. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction, Young Writers Edition
by Paul Grussendorf
On June 4, 1980, in a remote region of Lower Saxony, West Germany thirty-five hundred riot police forcibly cleared a population of one thousand anti-nuclear protestors out of a make-shift village which the activists had established on top of a nuclear bore site. The overwhelming police response to peaceful protestors was oddly similar to the recent eviction of a group of environmental protestors from a village sitting on top of a coal mine in Lutzerath, Germany on January 11, 2023. In 1980, I was there in the middle of the action with my camera crew. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 