Special Issue: Winter’s Tales
Lost Gods by Karen Jones

Once I was small, held in another’s palm, running along life lines, diving into fate lines, skipping over heart lines, a horizon beyond eternity my only view.

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Slip by Jason A. Zwiker

You slip. Fall. Wonder what you’ve broken this time. You wait for some new pain to sound alongside the slow tolling that’s rang inside of you through years of pills in the morning and pills at noon and pills again at bedtime and of trying to explain the ones your daughter finds forgotten in the organizer when she stops in to check on you.

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Not If We Don’t Want To by Al Kratz

I feel like I’m dying lately and some days this motivates me to do everything I can before my time runs out and other days it motivates me to do absolutely nothing at all.

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Igloo by Emily Devane

The winter that Dad left, taking Dougie with him, we all built an igloo. That morning, the garden was covered in a thick white glaze. Mum couldn’t sit still.

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Hail by Misty Urban

My husband told me to choose the restaurant though we’d never been to this town. He drove past every place I named and then, at the edge of civilization, jerked the car into the parking lot of a chain restaurant I hate because the cajun chicken I ate at one made me sick for days.

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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.

Hermit & Bleeding Faucet by Ana María Shua

With the population now well aware of the physical and mental benefits of asceticism (low cholesterol, bradycardia, a delicate sense of happiness, spiritual fulfillment), everyone wants to become a hermit.

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.

Conversation in Hotel Lounge by Lydia Davis

Two women sit together on the sofa in the hotel lounge, bent over and deep in conversation.  I am walking through, on my way to my room.

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!”