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Caleb Puckett
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 In these two short shorts Caleb Puckett sidesteps Borges and delivers a punch very much of his own making. Terse and ironic, "The Last Navigable Night" stands out as a powerfully crafted cameo. |
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Anuradha Lazarre
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 Anuradha Lazarre brings us this tale of grief and the publicization of loss. Taut phrases string together to create a work of affecting directness. |
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Tom Sheehan
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 After a period of site hacks and technological woes, PL inaugurates its first trouble-free month in some time with "The Emergence of Slow Purple" by Tom Sheehan. Adding to his body of witty and deceptively acute writing, "Slow Purple" is a fine addition to the PL canon. |
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Shaindel Beers
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 The story of a snake in a maintenance team, Beers's writing turns on conceptions of class, love, and dignity. A great work of fiction from the poetry editor of Contrary. |
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Gerald L. Dodge
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 I have lived here for the past fifteen years eight of them alone save for Jason and Carruthers. They've endured as long as I have in this place, this house with its lovely garden and shaded trees and the road far enough removed that even in the worst time of the day the traffic is hardly audible. |
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Sidney Kidd
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 "Aren't we quaint — sitting around this stage prop of a country store with a leaky pickle barrel as our centerpiece? Reminds me of our love life — preserved in the crusty dill brine of seasons past." |
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Rebekah Frumkin
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 "Christian Gimel was killed by a falling stand-up piano on the day The Dyke was painting the staircase in her apartment building. A chic couple was moving out of their apartment on Sheridan near the university for something closer to the city. As far as The Dyke knew, neither of them played. Christian Gimel, however, had been a virtuoso." |
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Gerald L. Dodge
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 Cotton Barbeau thought of himself as both lucky and damn smart. He was called Cotton by everyone who knew him even though he had been given the Christian name of Edwin—Edwin Peale Barbeau III—because he had a shock of white hair he had been born with and kept even into his late fifties. |
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Jon Feldman
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 Feldman's brutish wit is a star performer on Acme Shorts. "'You homo,' I chided myself. Here I was, lambing it from a half-million in calls on the most vicious shark in Vegas, and I was still heavy-leveraged on the biggest sucker bet of them all." |
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Tsipi Keller
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 A monologue of monologues. "The air hung heavy, hot and steamy, and whatever breeze there was before was now stilled. Microscopic insects flitted about, small ants climbed on the bench." The following is an excerpt from Tsipi Keller's new book Retelling. |
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Charles Gershman
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 Fiction by Charles Gershman, exploring race, bullying, and the transitory nature of both in children. A finely drawn narrative of youth. |
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Monica Kilian
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 In this first summer night in the year of the itch, I watch the rain clouds collide and part in a dance as old as memory, and I stretch out my hand towards the shrouded moon, the skin between my fingers once again as smooth and translucent as that of a newborn. |
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James Jay Egan
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The compost pile had degraded in size by half and the fresh manure was firm and black inside the bin. Alex unhooked and then pulled apart the snow fencing. He felt satisfied with the work he had put into filling the bin the previous fall. Over the winter the nitrogen and bacteria had worked to create a rich manure. |
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Juvenal Bucuane
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More excited than she'd ever been before, Ankbanatacha rushed into her parents' bedroom — feeling indulged as only a loving, guileless ten-year-old only child could be — where she found her father alone, getting ready for work. |
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Tom Sheehan
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Odd and memorable days often have odd and memorable starts. 63-year old Police Chief Ben Perdy's day was beginning and he didn't know it yet, sun rays still creeping toward his bedroom window, the flash momentary, sleep trying not to let go. |
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Shawn Casselle
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The note, if one word could be referred to as such, was on eggshell-blue stationery, and had come in a neat blank envelope, slipped under his door with sinister stealth while Henry was in school, probably, or down at Fantastic Worlds buying paperbacks, three for a dollar. |
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James Blessington
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The nature preserve near my work is pretty quiet during the winter. You'll see a lot of trees with no color, an occasional hawk, and some prints from rabbit and deer. Once in awhile you'll see a cluster of empty beer cans in the snow, or a discarded cup and straw from one of the fast food joints on Capital. |
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Samuel Vargo
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It's kind of nostalgic now, but wasn't then. Remember that cold winter with the bluejay in the backyard? Sure, there was an aviary's cast of feathered characters out there, but all I remember now is the blue dictator in the birdfeeder. |
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Iain Marshall
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Portents were in the air. First, to be given a shilling was remarkable. We were both handed a piece of the silver and sent into the outdoors, to appreciate the sun, amuse ourselves, get out from under the adults' feet. |
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Roberto Quezada-Dardon
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Thirty-five years before he died, a man with straight and thick but graying hair hurried down the worn carpeting of a steep wooden staircase. Raul was just five years old, and this was the earliest visual memory he had of his grandfather. The man's stockinged feet shuffled alternately off each step like playing cards flying off a deck. His khaki pants were creased from the hours he had just spent dozing in the deep embrace of threadbare cushions on his sofa. |
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Donald Hiscock
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Karel Dibcek woke up and thought for a moment that he was still in Prague. He lay warm inside the duvet, his head covered and his eyes still closed, listening for the familiar sounds of the trams and the car tyres skidding on the cobbles as they took the bend outside his apartment window. But it was quiet. He had slept deeply, more deeply than he had slept for weeks, and now he was coming to in a strange room. As soon as he let go of his lids and opened his eyes he remembered where he was. |
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D.E. Baris
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Deer Island is up the road from Doherty's house on Point Shirley. You can only drive so far out to the guard house where they stop you. If anyone tries to run the barricade, the cameras take a picture, sending a ticket through the mail. On the island there is: a sewerage treatment plant, a conference center, and a park with a trail people can walk or run. |
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Juvenal Bucuane
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It was the penultimate day of the working week, after the English fashion. Dominguinho was glancing through the paper first thing in the morning, when he froze on the page of death notices, realizing he was staring at the picture of his great friend N'Djokito who, to his double stupefaction, had been dead for a month, without him being aware of it. |
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Biff Mitchell
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Each morning she stood on the bank casting her line into the water and reeling it in slowly as white smoke curled around her nose from a cigarette lodged between her lips. She never puffed, just let them burn away as she stared into the deep brown water. Butts, burned down to the filters, littered the grass at her feet as though they'd just been dropped from her mouth after the tobacco had burned away. |
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Biff Mitchell
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Shards of sunlight flickered off the car's bumper as it disappeared over a rise in the road. Josh stared at the bright bursts of light and breathed deeply, winded from his run through the woods behind the shack where he lived. As though it had been hiding until the car left, the silence crept back from the woods, oozed from the wild grass and shrubbery pushing through cracks in the pavement where the two highways intersected. |
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Ed Lynskey
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Abbott, West Virginia, the town with a funny name, was a funny place to live. Needing somewhere to hang for the winter, I settled there and bought this cedar log cabin. The first owner Stubbs was a coal minter dying of black lung in a hospice. |
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Tom Sheehan
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It didn't announce itself, the difference in the room, but it was there, of that he was positive. It wasn't the soft caress of the new blanket, or the deep-sensed mattress he'd never slept on before, or the grass-laden field-laden air entirely new to him pushing through the open window and tumbling like puppies on his face. |
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Al Sim
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Rush hour was over but traffic in the city was still bad. The long summer days kept the streets busy. Chuy did not like this drive and did not enjoy going to his sister's. His mood got worse by the mile.
His sister lived on the south side, in a neighborhood of little off-white stucco houses with black iron bars on the windows and doors. |
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Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden
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Venerable Xoratio Rey is now very ill and there is no hope he will be able to live out his dream. That is why I am certain he will not resent me discussing him at this point. We all respected his work, but most of us realized too little about Xoratio's actual labor to be able to value it in the manner it deserved. Those rare few, among whom I had great honor to be, knew that Xoratio Rey is maybe the only true artist we would ever have the fortune to meet. |
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Jeffrey Ethan Lee
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I went home—after three hungry years, a dozen awful addresses, and too many leftover 60s prophets and 80s mental patients, and my father met me at the highway bus stop in his new-smelling imported car and announced, "You know, I've technically become a millionaire." |
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William R Stoddart
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There were different shades of blood on the streets and sidewalks. My neighbor told me it depended on where the pigeons were shot. Through the lungs was the brighter red. The men from the neighborhoods would split-up and travel in groups of three. |
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William R Stoddart
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It was November and getting near the end of the season. The cabin had no central heat and soon the snow would close the dirt road. It was their last trip to Eddy's and Jack was hungry for the perch. The fried perch was Eddy's Saturday special. Eddy's sat off the state road and overlooked the Allegheny River. |
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Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden
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A child-slave's blood washes the feet of the black prince in the mute heart of Africa. The prince will later use his blood-soaked feet to escape the lynching mob. One expects the dead child's family will be in the mob. But the little chief will use his Mercedes as well. One can always rely on a German automobile to run. |
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José Jorge Letria
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The hand never stopped writing, restless, febrile, piling-up on the flat top of an old mahogany table scores of written pages where fantastic and extravagant characters discussed dreams and the worlds that dreams enclose. |
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Juvenal Bucuane
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Now, this was not one of those cases in which a pig is killed in sacrifice and its private parts are gluttonously coveted as a divine relish, to be enjoyed only by the elders, as was the custom. This practice sensibly reinforced their hereditary capacity for the enthusiastic exercise of copulation. This time it was completely different. The very opposite. |
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Pamela MacIsaac
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Bob can play a number of instruments, none of them well.
He likes his guitar, an Ovation with a sensual, curving back. The guitar is useful because he can play it anywhere, in his room, in the living room if his father isn’t around, on the front step. Its sound can be quiet, non-confrontational. He finds it adequate most of the time, particularly since he’s expanded his repertoire of chords, but depressingly predictable. Everyone plays acoustic guitar, and its sound is nearly always the same. Only a few, very talented people can coax a new and interesting sound out of an acoustic guitar, and Bob knows he is not one of them. |
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Alistair Canlin
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"Hud the lift!" The bags Willie carried clanked as he ran.
Eric put his hand out to stop the door from closing.
"Ta much." Willie puffed.
"Nae problem." Eric eyed Willie's bags "Planin' a party?"
"Aye, it's at ma mate's."
"Aye."
The doors slid shut.
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José Mena Abrantes
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Through habit, and for no other reason, they sat in a ring, each observer and observed. It was a way as good as any to see that nobody did anything. But if the sand keeps coming in the wind, what shall we do? Shall we stop the wind? asked the one who always asked two questions, so that he could answer none. Another took advantage of the gap between the words... |
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Jim Harris
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Not long ago, when his parents were alive and his sister didn't have to live in a trailer or dress up as an Arab, Oliver painted himself into a corner. This was back when they had all lived out among the rolling hills outside Defiance, Missouri, in a big old farmhouse. All the place needed when they moved in was painting. It had everything else. If you sat on the huge, wraparound front porch and looked hard enough towards the south, you could see the Missouri River. Behind the house there were trees and behind the trees as if painted there were loping hills of rows upon rows of grape vines. It was Missouri wine country; a place with a history of German settlers who claimed this area reminded them of their homeland. |
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Neil Grimmett
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The first time I saw him was in our shift room. We were coming in mornings—early mornings. The night shift had already changed and they were lying on benches or sagging against walls looking ashen and mean as hungry vampires sensing the approaching dawn. He stood there: red-faced, brown-suited and uncontaminated. I marked him down for a Union lawyer or a top official, come to see one of the night-shift before they got their sense of reasoning back. We get them from time to time. They treat it as some big act of bravery to get this close. Something like those people you see in the B movies, who leave their safe city and head off into the wastelands for kicks. |
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Louis Malloy
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I stoked up for the expedition on hamburgers and eggs and had two beers to celebrate my arrival in the land of no traffic cops. Maybe of no law at all, because I couldn't see how it could ever be administered in the vast blank area stretching above me. I took out a notebook and wrote down a few ideas for an article on policing the wilderness. |
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Salvador Gutiérrez Solis
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Lucía blew out the eighteen candles of her white birthday cake in one go. She got the tip of her nose white with cream and her parents laughed merrily. Pedro, her boyfriend, waited impatiently at the back for the feast to end. |
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Suad Khatab
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Lt. Talib, of the Makkah police, had been passed over for Captain four years in a row. It was no longer about his ambition. It was now about respect... |
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Aaron Hellem
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Bathtubs:
Inevitably, our conversations involve them. He says, "There are bathtubs, and then there are bathtubs." But what he doesn't understand is this bathtub, and how this bathtub is not unlike other bathtubs when filled with water. |
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Andrea Rudy
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Stop beating yourself up, they would always say. She had many friends, but they were forever changing and it got to her at times. When she pondered with the latest friend why another friend never came around any more, the answer was always not to beat herself up; anyone would be crazy to stop a friendship with her. |
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J. Lewelling
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They must leave the lights on all night, I thought, looking down on the blue water of the pool. It's far too late for a swim. Everyone is fast asleep.
(From his novel, Tortoise). |
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Tom Sheehan
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Judd Helme, as a youngster, was held by his naked heels out over the edge of this very same bridge by his drug-addicted father, and in front of his mother, now long deceased. The act was done in view of a small group of onlookers, one of whom related to me the events of that situation. Nobody knows why Judd was not dropped. |
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Fiction 