That morning, when they set out to follow the fence line that surrounded their property, Sarah Billard didn’t expect her daddy to stop at the southern section. She could hardly recall the last time seed had taken root there—all…
Cassie found the book at a bus stop next to a pair of abandoned men’s shoes: The Study and Practice of Astral Projection: The Definitive Survey on Out-of-the-Body Experiences, by Dr. Robert Crookall. On the cover was a drawing…
By Nicole Barney • Garth Greenwell’s second novel, Cleanness, revisits the territory of his debut, fleshing out the experiences of the narrator beyond those of his encounters with Mitko, a young man he meets in a public bathroom and…
“I wish she’d just hawk it up and spit it out. You know? Loogie-style.” That’s what I say to Dave in front of the Kwik Stop. We’re on our lunch, drinking off-brand iced tea in plastic bottles and as…
By Melissa Benton Barker • The stories in Mary Gaitskill’s collection Don’t Cry are like tiny mirrors held close, all the pores and blemishes of her characters offered up for the readers’ inspection. Published in 2009, the collection scrupulously…
There are funnel cakes. There are deep-fried Kit Kats. There are even deep-fried sticks of butter. Sam’s feet sink into the mud that’s covered with straw because it rained ten inches in forty-eight hours and it’s probably going to…
I want to bring the rubber ducks. Patrick wants me to leave the rubber ducks behind. We bicker about it for days, before the move, and when our closets have been emptied and we’ve packed the essentials and there…
Amy had never noticed it before. It might have just appeared during the night, but it was so innocuous, it could have been waiting there, unobserved, for years. This childish symbol, something like a diamond with rays emanating from…
For weeks now, the police have been looking for a man. Thin build, five-foot-six, black hair. Sketches make him look like a scrawny, scruffy, Asian Robert Downey Jr., though even in black and white, graphite on smooth grain paper,…
Wendy J. Fox’s recent novel, If the Ice Had Held, out now from Santa Fe Writers Project, explores the secrets of a Colorado family and how far its members have gone to keep them. Told in alternating perspectives, the…
