traffic jam

noon

Outbound

Bed and Breakfast

/ Rebecca Thursten / Fiction
Don't feed my cat. Don't touch my fucking cat. Don't take any more photos of my fucking cat.

AS A GROWN WOMAN YET RECALLED

/ Derrick Martin-Campbell / Fiction
Taylor Swift, warrior zealot, daughter of many kings, prodigy of her people’s finest schools and temples, set loose in Nashville at fourteen like a falcon thrown into the air...

Sex Tour

/ Refael Paul Arenson / Fiction
And then he's standing in the doorway, watching me walk down the hall.

Snow (from the Intimate Journals of Jacob Higginbotham)

/ John Crutchfield / Fiction
It snowed last night, Dear Reader, in the town where I live. Probably it snowed in other places too, but I wasn’t in any of those other places, so I am unable to verify this conjecture.

Umlaut

Some Luckies

How to Inflate a Balloon

/ Ka Bradley / Fiction
Red is puissant and favoured by higher orders, but in the hands of the timorous or unnerved can be fatal; mutilation at a tissue level is more than likely.

Liminal

/ Brian Michael Barebito / Fiction
People can take a long time to get to the places at the edges of cities if they don’t really want to go there.

Divination

/ Brian Michael Barbeito / Fiction
Good. Good for you. Good for me. Good for the angels hiding coyly in the firmament.

Pushing Blood

/ Brian Michael Barbeito / Fiction
(THE WORLD WRESTLING FEDERATION, A PROBLEM WITH THE HEMOGLOBIN, FOGGY NIGHT STRIPPERS, AND THE DIVINE FEMININE)

(No Subject)

/ Donald Quist / Fiction
Maybe this picture of us on the elevator should stay lost in a dresser drawer. I wish I could do the same with others, remove them from digital walls and tuck them somewhere I might forget them.

How Speech Returned to the World

/ Charlie Geoghegan-Clements / Fiction
A new luxury economy arose, and the value of teeth quickly overtook that of diamonds or gold.

An Unconsummated Rendez-vous w/ a YouTubeuse

/ Ali Znaidi / Fiction
What if the dust of the cemetery gonna fill in her eyes? What if the sparkle gonna go?

The Menagerie

/ Judson Hamilton / Fiction
It was then that I moved into the barracuda phase. At first I had considered making a bear but it was just too warm-blooded and could conceivably be ‘cuddly’ or ‘cute’. I didn’t want cute - I wanted to instill terror in those that looked on this head, to paralyze them with fear. So I chose the barracuda which is just about the most terrifying head ever invented by nature.

Totality

Blue Foreruns Black

/ Nic Schmidt with illustrations by Goodie / Fiction
I’m wary of premeditated art: to obsess over an artistic idea is to dig ourselves into a trench with our beauty until we can no longer see the moonlight.

The Pet Store

/ Jennifer Companik / Fiction
I fared no better with hamsters. They averaged a couple months apiece. Marchie started calling me the “Grim Reaper of Animals.”