Issue #29
The Good Prizes by Daniel Addercouth

Clare’s father gives her more coins for the claw machine. There’s a stuffed Pokemon she wants to win. “These things are designed so you can never get the good prizes,” her father says.

read more
Lullaby by Darlene Eliot

There’s an owl outside the window. He hoots at 1:00 a.m. The tenants toss, turn, and fume. 3B opens the window, aims a flashlight at the leaves. 2A stomps out with a tennis ball and hurls it at the tree.

read more
Nowhere Girl by Robert Herbst

You were one car over, all curls and eyes. I was just four wheels, an engine. This was at the stoplight – Western and Milwaukee. I pulled up, and it was like you’d been waiting for me in someone else’s backseat all night.

read more
Love® by Serena Jayne

Ask a doctor or pharmacist before use if you are taking tranquilizers or sedatives, it’s last call, one of your friends recently coupled, or you are approaching a milestone birthday and in danger of marrying your backup partner.

read more
Linguistics by Kelly Pedro

The word of the day is chartreuse, a variable color averaging a brilliant yellow green. Origin: Once Latin, now French. Used in a sentence: Elyse knew why the chartreuse sweater was on clearance—the threads were starting to fray, and it clearly wasn’t well made, but Elyse bought it anyway because she found something about it charming.

read more
God’s Gift by Audrey NIVEN

Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with you as you stoat down the street, hungover, shoes not tied.
‘Ho, Mary!’ he shouts over the traffic.

read more
Gonna Be a Poet by Tom Vowler

Between hits we hang out at the beach, perched naked on salt-rimed stanchions, cocking a leg high like we’re the Karate Kid, before tumbling into the waves’ icy maw, where we bawl so hard even the gulls are offended.

read more

The Bronze Medal by Vincent James Perrone

She wants to meet the pig—snout down, paraded through the town square of sodden earth and
stump dimples, now trailed by serpentine line of freshly showered farmer with tomato noses and
breath prematurely soured from all that auctioneer talk.

Husband by Sara Cappell Thomason

I want a house, a wife, a steak dinner and all my bills paid on time. I want to settle down in a house and get paid. Dinner from my wife served on time

Prudence by Christy Stillwell

They put the shock collar on the boy and that was it for the nanny. First they put the collar on one another. They were professors in English and Philosophy, all of them smart people.

Gallows Pole by Kathy Hoyle

In the dead of summer, while the whiptails hide in sagebrush shadows, and everything blisters in the amber heat and there ain’t nothin but buzzards hummin for miles around, a hanged man dances on a gallows pole.

After by Claudia Monpere

and after and after and nothing changes, just the names of the children. This one drew birds wearing hats. That one had an orange juice popsicle for an imaginary friend.