Issue #25
The Hook by Kayann Short

I catch the Skip at the last bus stop on the route, the one right next to the homeless shelter. Usually, I see folks riding from this stop for a few weeks before they move on.

read more
Snow Globe by Yael Veitz

I am visiting my grandfather at the nursing home. All night, I must swallow my rage.  I swallow my rage at the nurses who are rude to me, at the broken healthcare system. I swallow my rage at him.

read more
Hologram Jesus by Eileen Vorbach Collins

From the front-row pew, reserved for the junior choir, I sat up straight, careful to keep my Sunday dress covering my knees while I kept an eye on Hologram Jesus in the ornate fake gold frame.

read more
Grandma by L. Soviero

Mom said Grandma never stood a chance. Because a name’s a shove. And when Mrs. Shapiro introduced Grandma Leary to our junior high class, the new girl was shoved into a room of cruel expressions.

read more
Nkuku by Gaele Sobott

Leah rolls through the valley of ghouls, where she is an anxious slave to the economic order. She has found the courage to take time off work, by pretending to be sick.

read more

Initiation by Stuart Dybek

The doors snap open on Addison, and the kid in dirty hightops and a sleeveless denim jacket that shows off a blue pitchfork tattooed on his bicep jogs forward beneath a backward baseball cap and grabs the purse off a babushka’s lap.

Café Mozart Dreamin’ by Tracey Meloni

Judie bangs on my hotel door. “The dressmaker is here! Hurry! You have Christmas lunch with Noah at Café Mozart at 1PM!” 

The Girl In Purple by Bobbie Ann Mason

Near dawn, Dennis Moore saw the iron gate to the courtyard inch open and the wisp of a girl squeeze through, clanging the gate behind her. Two minutes later, on the boardwalk, she halted as if for an invisible dog, then resumed her dog-walker gait. He followed her...

Their Closet by Pamela Painter

“What are you thinking?” her husband asked her. In their twenty years of marriage he had never asked her that.

Lady Gaga Considers the Shrimp Scampi by Steve Almond

There were fifty thousand little monsters screaming for an encore, Spaniards, Germans, skinny little French boys, Italians making wet sounds with their tongues.