Issue #2
In Heels by Hobie Anthony

She left her shoes on the corner every time she took me up to her room. The desk clerk had been paid off so that she could walk barefoot whenever she wanted.

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Sunbather by Nicholas Cook

The sky is squeegeed cloudless. He’s seeing a sunbather on the side. I picture her breasts, skin burnt by tar paper on the roof.

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Why You Move to New York, v. mid-80s by Steve Adams

Because you saw Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver and The Panic in Needle Park, and connected to the disturbing beauty beneath the horror, the dangers, something you needed to see and taste, something hard enough to wake you from the slumber of the small town you’d grown up in, and then Austin, where you’d moved afterward; a place that had frightened you at first.

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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.

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.

Fun House by Robert Scotellaro

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

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.