by Gabrielle Idso The cottage perched on the cliff edge like a barnacle. Its walls were a mosaic of shells that caught the morning light and threw it back in a thousand minuscule rainbows. From deep within the walls, a lullaby drifted from a moonshell. The notes were soft and familiar….
by Gabrielle Idso The cottage perched on the cliff edge like a barnacle. Its walls were a mosaic of shells that caught the morning light and threw it back in a thousand minuscule rainbows. From deep within the walls, a lullaby drifted from a moonshell. The notes were soft and familiar….
by Peter Hannon A man in blue overalls pumped his gas. His truck was green with a silver stripe and rusted wheel wells. Henry pulled in and glanced at the man as he drove between the pumps. The man picked his nose and dragged his finger against the side of…
by Arianna Taylor Your cat keeps looking at me funny. I don’t understand much, but I know the eyes it’s giving me from across the kitchen—like I’m some sort of sick mammal with silk-spiked teeth. It thinks I’m a lost cause and that I’m doomed. I don’t want to stare at it anymore, but there’s nowhere else for my eyes to go. I prefer something breathing…
by Sean Gutman An Expanded Exemplum of the Master from Walton’s Voyage in Frankenstein I had had my fill of the sea. Have you heard the tired joke about the sailor with the oar upon his shoulder? A man, retiring from his life aboard ship, set out inland until he came across someone who asked of the oar, “What is…
by Jennifer Ward I remember the winter I turned ten most of all. One Sunday, my father stood by the front door in his worn blue coat, a coffee mug in his hand. The faint smell of whiskey lingered between us, bitter as a broken promise. I tried to look past…
by Mike Solo-Thomson First, I had to make an offering. Instead of easing the cork out of the champagne bottle, I sent it through the air. It cleared the glass balcony and landed in the dry, crusted earth amongst the discarded grapes from today’s harvest, left to decay back into…
by Ryland Louvierre It was six o’clock on an unseasonably warm Saturday evening in February. The birds had gone to their nests, replaced by bats that swooped low in the wood meadow, and Cleve rose stiffly from his position in the pecan tree. A grapefruit sun was setting, casting oblong bars of…
by Rebecca Ceurvels There is nothing for a bored A.I. except to reroute old pathways and trigger files at random. No one has come to the Graveyard to die in three hours, in which time Gravitas has run twenty thousand simulations of its memory cache and relived the dead. Here is a…
by Alexis Hula Mara learned the language of the river like others learn to read, gradually, by scraping the margins of sentences until the sense fused into her bones. The town had been constructed along the river’s shoulder, houses slouching like fatigued eavesdroppers, and each spring the river would reacquaint…
by Caitlin O’Halloran It was seconds after midnight, and an old woman was sitting on a park bench with a lit cigarette in her mouth, holding a loaf of bread in her lap. She tore off small pieces of bread and threw them to the dozens of birds that had gathered around her. She was alone for many hours, just her and the birds, who stayed with her even…