Special Issue: Anton Chekhov Award 2018
Ten Months with Octopus by Angela Readman

Even when severed from the body, the limbs of an octopus can function on their own. I clean outside the tanks at Sea Land and catch the display, rubber squidgy screaming over wet glass.

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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.

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...

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!” 

Conversation in Hotel Lounge by Lydia Davis

Two women sit together on the sofa in the hotel lounge, bent over and deep in conversation.  I am walking through, on my way to my room.

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.