Issue #17
Homesteading by Gretchen VanWormer

In August, Sarah said she’d begin by preserving water. A test run. She’d placed an order online: Ball Pint Jar, Regular Mouth, Set of 12; The Canning Essentials Boxed Set; I Eat Local Because I Can Apron.

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Good Mood by Joanna Ruocco

I am in a good mood, but birds are in a bad mood. What’s up, birds? This morning I did the stretches I never do, the hamstring stretches.

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Downwinders by Sarah Blackman

Inside the body the baby is coiling, flexed, not on the way to becoming but already become. Mother is having a picnic with father and brother and sis.

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Temp by Rob Roensch

The van had no side windows, the driver’s-side mirror dangled like a hand from a broken wrist, the passenger-side mirror and half the windshield were blurry and blue with ice from the storm, and the view out the back windows was blocked by boxes.

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Yellow by Constance Squires

In the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 199,5 a Ryder truck rigged as a bomb went of at 9:02 AM, killing at least 168 people and injuring 680 others.

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Silver Bell by Evelyn Hampton

The trouble with the cow was the cow had an adumbrated esophagus, which caused a gastrointestinal incursion from its first stomach into its second, so that nothing from the first could flow into the second.

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Work Done on the Flesh by George Looney

A cave-in one county over keeps me up.  The late news has live cameras at the entrance where men come out, coughing up clouds of dust that shroud their faces and shimmer in the stark light of the video cameras.

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Monster by Aurelie Sheehan

I am lonely, so lonely that I go to the store to buy lemonade and when l see you at the register I say, hubba hubba, sweet lady, and you say [shriek]. This isn’t helping at all, this whole, other people thing.

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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!” 

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.

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.

Fun House by Robert Scotellaro

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