Volume 1, Issue 2
by T. R. Healy
"Mister?"
Jordy turned around and saw the little girl he had sold a balloon to only a couple of minutes ago. "What is it, dear?"
"My balloon flew away."
by Holly Interlandi
Sadie chewed her piece of pizza and spit each olive into a paper napkin. There was no one at the table to call her on her bad manners, and she had always hated olives, but the Italian pizza ensemble had come with them as the fourth topping in a combination she couldn't possibly refuse. Sadie wondered why she was bothering to eat 'New York style' pizza on the West Coast. It could be attributed to nostalgia. But she didn't miss anything. She never had.
by Julie Weston
Jack figures it isn't hard to make money. Say he lost his allowance for not helping with the dishes and for coming home late from the movies. Say there's a bb gun on sale at Rullman's Hardware. Say he needs it by August when the scouts go out camping. Well, here's how he plans to raise the dough.
by Rochelle Ratner
Eight years old. On their way home from church they stop to visit a friend of his father, and the house next door has a fish pond. There's no fence between the two houses, so of course he wanders over. He scoops a fish out with his cupped hands, runs over all excited to show his father. The fish, looking only for water, manages to jump into his open mouth, lodges in his trachea.
by Jerry Vilhotti
A loud thunder blast accompanied by frightening streaks of lightening ricocheting throughout his brain were his wife's words.
by David Feela
A prospector who had married a mountain lusted after a prairie. All day, all night, deeper and deeper with his feeble shaft, in and out with his buckets, scraping away the darkness, searching for an impossible glitter of gold. Some days he would be below the surface of the earth for so long he wasn’t sure it was day at all, only night without end, like his wedding night when he ceremoniously broke the ground that would eventually be this drudgery.
by Bill West
I turn the key and open the front door, scuff mud from my best black shoes on the mat that says Welcome. You are not in the kitchen singing and I don't call out, "Honey I'm home!" like someone always did in that American tv show from our youth.
by Karl Elder
They were like moth wings—these shavings from a hand-held pencil sharpener. It was a discovery, this likeness, so fabulously beautiful to her at such a tender age that she would not write it in her diary, afraid to say it in words, to translate it into the silence of handwriting, that to utter it in any manner might rend the image from her mind, send it flying like a weightless leaf through its vanishing point into the irretrievable past. And what she did that afternoon in her grandmother's kitchen in spite that she had in her possession the last pencil in the house with which to write or draw is she made more wings.
by Josh Stewart
The pub was kicking on a Thursday night. It was not by any means crowded – it was a Thursday – but the regular crowd of people who liked starting their weekends early was around. Most inhabited the area by the pool tables, which was very typical in appearance. There were three or four occupied booths, and the rest of the people, consisting of six or seven sports fans that were enjoying a football game on TV, were huddled around the bar.
by Ann Lightcap Bruno
In grad school, I bought a short black dress for thirty bucks so I could be Harry’s fake date at the wedding of a high school friend. Fiona, his leggy, bad news ex, would be there. We took the ferry to Long Island, and I played the best older sexy blonde I could. “Harry’s really great,” these drunk guys would come and say, and I would nod and smile. Fiona glared for a while and then did some showy dancing with her date who swung her all over while the DJ spun “Funky Town.”
by Laura Stamps
Each day of the week shimmers with a different form of energy easily tapped for the purpose of white magick. Thursday is charged with the power of success. To attract an attitude of good fortune Ravena greets this day with a blessing chant:
by Dow Ford
Her mother tied a tiny braided band on the child's wrist, and with her last bit of strength the child lifted her arm to look at it. The colors were ocre and rouge, but a blue thread ran through it like the vein on her mother's breast. The fire was inside her now and her vision blurred. Across the way, on the other side of the dark wide river, lay a land where the grass grew tall and the ravens were scattered over the pale blue sky like drops of ink slung from a calf's hair brush. As she saw herself wade into the river, she welcomed the cool deep water that would slake the raging fire within her. "One will come for you," she heard her mother say as the heat drained from her body, "and when He does, you must needs go."
by Brian Cabrera
From the moment he woke he knew that his fever had broken. His head felt clear and he even noticed that he was hungry. He knew this to be a good sign. In the darkness, he stared up at the ceiling and recalled the past weeks of struggle. The days of delirium, sweating, and vomiting. The shock of being told that they would have to fly him out to Rochester, not next week, not tomorrow, but right now.
by Daniel M. Jaffe
Billy clicks the TV mute button, fiddles with the belt of his gold, terrycloth robe, turns green eyes to her and asks, “What’s going on?”
“What?” Marla shuts the Hertz Bible, leans back on the sofa, stretches her white-socked feet onto his lap.
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