Issue #1
Bird by Kim Chinquee

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.

read more
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.

read more
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.

read more
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.”

read more
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.

read more

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...

Little Red Riding Hood by Katerina Kishchynska

Grandma gets her episodes at least once a month. She’ll grow out her jaws and if it happens on a rainy day, claws will tear out of her fingers.

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.

Fun House by Robert Scotellaro

She’d gotten the fun house mirrors at an auction and had them put up in the spare bedroom.

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.