Fiction 55

A Lost Battle

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

My wife and I used to talk about everything. I was quite content with her, but I left her for Diana, whose attractive combination of instability and stubbornness I found irresistible. I lived with Diana, talking about everything (as intimacy...

by James Terry

It was my last summer in Deming and I was feeling low. All I wanted was to get the hell out. But I had to work and save money. In August I'd be in LA. I was the groundskeeper at...

by Lyubko Deresh

People always asked him if he was the Yurko Banzai. "No," Yurko Banzai would say with a smile, and, anticipating the next question, add: "We're not even related." Banzai was a senior studying biology. He was one of the top...

by Trent England

Before he went downstairs, before he went downstairs to fight, I remember my brother sticking the tape in the player, the tape that played the piano music. This was before he would go downstairs and get himself killed, almost to...

by Eleanor Goodman

"I talked to Dan today." He spoke into her hair, which smelled musky like tropical flowers, the kind that open their petals in vulgar red profusions when the sun hits them the right way. Rebecca always smelled like that after...

by David Philip Mullins

All afternoon he thought of her, eagerly imagining the details of her body: her height, her weight, the color of her skin, the curves of her legs, hips, breasts. Now, as Nick walks west through the Tenderloin, nearing the corner...

by Christina Lowell Brazelton

The mud is back again. This year, as every year, it's worse than ever. Underneath a few inches of greasy slime, as thick as a ganache, is ice. Warming the dark mud, the spring sun melts through the ice in...

Max Frisch at the Roundtable with American Writers, 1981

In November of 1981, the Swiss novelist and playwright, Max Frisch, gave two talks at The City College of New York in front of a large audience in a series called the Jacob C. Saposnekow Lectures. Max had asked for...

by Rebecca Chace

Shipwreck: But it wasn't. It was much more mundane, though no less violent. "Lie like the truth" —Daniel Defoe Why do I need to circle around and invent when a list of facts could do just as well or better:...

by Tamas Dobozy

Sándor Kálmán was a tough guy. He would move an oak desk or filing cabinet or armoire without bothering to unpack what was inside. He had a temper as well, and his voice could blow a door off its hinges...

by Eric Gansworth

We had never spent any time together in high school, not even a lunch table once. While it was true that our school district included a little neighborhood that had started as a German settlement, and while it should have...

by Kathy Passero

The ruptured tire let out a loud staccato thwap thwap thwap, and Drew pulled the Grand Cherokee onto the shoulder of the highway. "Shit," he said. "Don't you know how to change it?" Kevin asked. "Do you?" The two men...

by Victoria Sprow

The women had taken a hotel up in Maine, where the lobsters were. The room had a double bed and a kitchenette. The women slept with their backs to each other. The window opened out onto the bay. When they...

by Naton Leslie

For the moment, all he knew was the wind. The throbbing of the new snowmobile engine coursed through his arms and legs, the featureless ice not providing the least resistance as he throttled across the lake. The wind was cutting,...

by Halina Duraj

I was the only kid I knew whose father had an alias. The utility bills came to our house addressed to Zbigniew Zaszewski, but my father's name was Edward Witecki. When I asked him about it, he said he bought...

by R. Clifton Spargo

No one offers me a drink. Eliot and Sara come and go through the screen door to their kitchen maybe half a dozen times, bringing towels for the children, pitchers of Kool-Aid, bowls full of potato chips, Cheetos, and pretzels...

by Ben Stroud

My parents were watching the bathroom door. It was covered with rust blooms and key-scratched graffiti that spelled Killa over and over. "Maybe she's sick," my mother said. "What did she eat?" "Enchiladas," my stepfather answered. We were parked outside...

by Mark Jay Mirsky

When I left Berlin, Hannah pressed a gift into my hand. It was the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff, a small cassette. I played it repeatedly, in my office, never wondering why she should give me this work of a composer I...

Fiction 55

A Lost Battle

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Midnight Pools

by James Terry

Cult

by Lyubko Deresh

Frog Colony

by Trent England

Getting to No

by Eleanor Goodman

The Last Thing in the World

by David Philip Mullins

The Rural Life

by Christina Lowell Brazelton

Max Frisch at the Roundtable with American Writers, 1981

Looking for Robinson Crusoe

by Rebecca Chace

Days of Orphans and Strangers

by Tamas Dobozy

Gross Anatomy

by Eric Gansworth

Breaking Down

by Kathy Passero

Waiting for the Creel

by Victoria Sprow

Thin Ice

by Naton Leslie

The Family Cannon

by Halina Duraj

American Women

by R. Clifton Spargo

Tucumcari

by Ben Stroud

Scheherezade - Constructed

by Mark Jay Mirsky