I am early, sitting in bird’s-eye of the bakery, reading my book outside at a table. It’s a good book, with language I appreciate, and the plot moves along.
Bird by Kim Chinquee
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Issue #1
MYSTERY by Luisa Valenzuela, translated by Kirk Nesset
There is a suspect, of course. You read the flash fiction again, examine it word by word, letter by letter, and find nothing.
Sparrow, Crow by Chuck Rosenthal
Diosa met Ruth Sparrow in a poetry writing workshop that Sparrow offered while visiting UVA in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Fun House by Robert Scotellaro
She’d gotten the fun house mirrors at an auction and had them put up in the spare bedroom.
Fifty Bucks Leftover by Leonard Kress
My husband buys me earrings and hands them to me. I take the box, pry open the lid.
In the Shape of by Matthew Fogarty
That day it was cloudy and there was a grinding noise of gears coming off the clouds muscling into and out of each other, gears like on a car or a freight train but like they’d been winter-rusted.
Vapid by Cooper Renner
Sure, it looked like there were grapes in his jeans. No doubt. This was his fantasy: she’d come and peel him out of his shell, not even say please.
Vladimir and Estragon by Natalia Rachel Singer
He thought we were only company men, loyal but a little dim-witted, the kind of guys who pass the time making simple observations like “Look, a tree,” and “Yeah, that fat guy is really eating a whole chicken and throwing the bones right on the ground.”
Dive by Tom Hazuka
I’m back by the pool table in Shank’s, a dive on the wrong side of downtown, trying not to yawn or stare at the chest of a girl in a tight T-shirt babbling about her ex-boyfriend. Suddenly glass shatters, louder than “Freebird” wailing on the jukebox.
Secrets by Sherrie Flick
This is the way it happened: Robbie jumped out of the hayloft and hit his head.
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.
Bad Dog by Molly Giles
Whiskery tub of muscle with flicks of spit and slime shot from spotted tongue and slick pink dick.
The Modern Man by Sean Lovelace
The Modern Man came off the mountain and started tussling. He tussled the local farmers, then the villagers, then the vagabonds.
THIS IS NOT A BILL by Gary Lutz
I was either a bad reflection on my parents or their one true likeness. But my own kids?
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.