James Tadd Adcox

I Keep Finding Things I Thought I’d Lost Long Ago

For example, this morning, I was cleaning out the bathroom sink drain. It hadn’t been cleaned for, God knows, five years maybe, and water had started backing up every time I washed my hands. I was digging down in it with [...]

Eric Beeny

LIVING EXPENSES

Mortimer fingered through all the catalogs and placed his order for a New World.

In 6 to 8 weeks a large box marked “Fragile” arrived in the mail, with instructions manual outlining what little assembly’s required.

Mortimer tore it open, arranged the pieces as he found them — he filled the [...]

Sheldon Lee Compton

Drugs, Rock and Roll and Sex or Three Things That Go Together Like Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll

Shifted into high gear about three hours in.   I played off-beat most of the time until then.   Forced Calvin to restart the mixing board, shot me dirty looks with droopy [...]

Kristina Marie Darling

[pastoral:   in which one's faith may be seen and touched]

Always night, always a listless moon as we drive into the prairie’s thistled heart.   Around us, knotweed.   Its twisted foliage, the anxious spark.   His body still rooms opening within a room, the staircase burning in a locked [...]

I. Fontana

AMNESIA

He’s too rough.   She has other complaints as well.   She doesn’t like his friends. He doesn’t make enough money.  There is a bruise of many colors on the soft skin of her arm.

The red of the Coca-Cola signs is the same all over the world.

This face [...]

Janet Freeman

The Ugliest Drowned Man in the World Washes Ashore Lake Michigan

A cover of a story written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The first children who saw the orange speck bobbing in the distance let themselves believe the sun had dropped from the sky, as their parents had warned would [...]

John Haggerty

The Incredible Teeth of Bobby McGraw

Bobby was a man with a passionate temperament and very few of his original teeth. The two were closely related—his mouth had sustained extensive damage in bar fights. He was also extraordinarily taken with the technology that replaced what nature had given him and alcohol [...]

Steve Himmer

Be Your Own Boss

Before getting fired I’d never measured how much empty time makes a day. I’d spent years writing blogs on the company’s dime, leading dozens of made-up lives with their own careers and diseases and hobbies, and all those voices I had to keep speaking carried me through [...]

Michael Jurkovic

THE PACIFIC TRASH VORTEX

When I first discovered
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,

Twice the size of Texas
And currently on the move

I thought, “Star Trek, Star Date 4202.9″
As the Doomsday Machine

Ate every planet in sight
And it blew my mind!

How do we dispose
Of so much shit

That it is now mutating at horse latitude,
Migrating tenfold [...]

Keith Kurzman

What to Do in the Event of a Plane Crash

1.

Don’t panic.

Pilots can smell panic, and it makes them jumpy
like horses before a storm,
or the way an ape might cradle an egg.

2.

Count the times you said you were sorry.
Subtract out the times you meant it.
Multiply by a numerical representation
of the way [...]

Ben Loory

“The Woman and the Basement,” which originally appeared in the December 2009 issue, was taken down by request of the author.

The Cigarette

The woman awakens when it is not quite yet dawn. She reaches out to take a cigarette from the nightstand. And it is then, as she lights it and [...]

Antonios Maltezos

Chalet

Hanna expected a romantic chalet at the foot of the Laurentian Mountains, not this simple cabin for three seasons buried deep in the shag of an airless green monster, pines for hair, a black lake its one evil eye — the fishing here was out of this world. If only [...]

Jessa Marsh

Fix Us

When I was in middle school, I tried to be a cutter.

I couldn’t press the blade down hard enough to draw a drop of blood.

But give me a butcher’s knife and a pregnant belly and I am practically a gynecological surgeon.

Danny, I know what you are thinking—

It’s an old [...]

Michelle Matthees

Dear Mr. Wilton,

I’m sorry that when I tried to deliver your pizza to you, you were in a coma. My co-workers and I tried to figure it out. We were amazed that you called and ordered yourself a pepperoni thin crust. We wondered if maybe it was a miracle of [...]

Rachel Mehl

Following Todd

We never spoke, which made him perfect,
this blond haired boy in my choir class.
It was the first winter my father stayed in bed.
On the school bus older girls stuck chewed cherry
Bubble Yum in my hair and poked me with tampons.
At home my father called, Rachel, come lay by me.
I [...]

Kevin O’Cuinn

Graphologizing

They’d missed each other, had passed each other by with precision. Minutes were windows to escape through and nothing was wrong until verbalized.

They communicated via Post-its, stuck them on the mirror in the hallway. Cancellations mostly, but reminders, too — the tax return, a signature. The notes grew shorter, [...]

Ethel Rohan

Air

Tracy didn’t like working nights at the gas station, too many crazies and stupid kids, although she was essentially her own boss for the eight hour shift and had little to do.

She reminded herself of those perks when the burly guy in the gray hoodie walked in shortly before midnight, [...]

Fortunato Salazar

Men at Work

Not using protection, that’s why I first noticed him. From upstairs where I was working out. He was in the street. The street is always getting dug up.

I brought him around to the patio to show him the scat. He said it was ravens. I said I’d never [...]

Reynard Seifert

Mud Cakes

On our first date we bought a plant.

We watered the plant every week. The compost was so fresh we tasted it with our tongues just because. Then we made out. Fingers to skin, finding new ways to feel with human hands the strange glow of a body in the [...]

Valerie Wetlaufer

Bad Wife Spankings

My wedding dress is stale in the closet.
You crumble drunk on the stairs,
still plagiarizing your vows,

while elsewhere, girls are getting married.
The tablecloth wilts beneath the roast
and the cats lap up the melting butter

before it hardens in the china dish.
The buried box, full of all your gifts—
regret, tattoos, razorblades, [...]

Ben White

Make a Mistake with Me

Here’s the deal: I’m looking for love but I don’t have to time to fuck around trolling for pussy in bars. I work in finance. Yes, I have money. Yes, my apartment building has a doorman. I’m 29, 6’1″, brown-haired, 4-pack abs (yes, that’s right, I’m [...]