Issue 54

Rowing to Russia

by Ryan Effgen

When Kevin walked into the Miller's Pub dowtown, his father was finishing his drink and ordering another. He wore a charcoal grey suit and had a leather briefcase by his side. He looked tired. Though not an old man, Kevin's...

by Thomas E. Kennedy

Sklar jolts off his sweaty sofa in the ungodly dark to get the phone, thinking, Pop's gone. But his father's phlegmy voice, without greeting or apology for the hour, wheezes in his ear, "I'm alone here! I need things. I'm...

by Mary Marcus

My life changed on the second night of Passover in the Jewish year 5751. I'm not sure what the calendar year was; though it was the early nineties, before the earthquake. Why do I remember the religious year in my...

by Richard Wirick

Gillian was relieved when his friends Matt and Sally invited him to dinner the following night. They would have Maddie come, a Swedish girl they had just met at a Mabou Mimes production in SoHo. Matt joked to Gill that...

by Martha Schwendener

It was an accident, pure and simple. In the past she would've taken care of it with an afternoon at the doctor's office, but this time she'd been persuaded otherwise. She was getting older. She was running out of time....

by Tim Horvath

The life of an urban planner is at once both more and less exotic than it might appear. Raedmeon is a city built by a committee, riding in on slow, lumbering beasts of burden, and Weston a Committee Man if...

by Patricia Schultheis

We cleaned for our mothers. Off boats and kerchiefed, they stood at conveyor belts, boxing brassieres or culling cartridges, their hands growing cramped, their ankles swollen, until, shift over, they scarcely could climb onto buses and ride to third-floor flats...

by Mark Jay Mirsky

Among the rewards of editing Fiction has been my introduction to a number of writers whom I admire. Among them was Max Frisch, the Swiss novelist and playwright. Max was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century....

by Gregory Blake Smith

When the tree fell on my house, I was already on my way down. Wife gone, son gone, middle age just around the corner. There had been no hurricane, no stiff in-line winds: the tree just fell over—plunk! The rafters...

by Kay Sloan

She piddled on the leather loveseat, the buttery soft one by the fireplace in her son's living room, listening to her daughter-in-law prattle about their latest trip to Seville and Marrakesh. It was the Morocco tales that had gotten her...

by Michael Poore

When Carter Vaan was a baby, they put him on the cover of a book. The book, How to Raise a Positive-Thinking Baby, sold about eight million copies. Cute picture. Carter, six months old, sitting naked in a nest of...

by Michael Poore

Verna May sits in her trailer with the lights off, spying on her neighbor. Her neighbor is a thief who steals TVs and things and always has them stacked up where you can see them through the window. Nobody ever...

by Luc Lang

...we were stuck in a traffic jam, it was raining, dismal, the red and white lights wept and streamed with water, I was continually wiping the steamed-up car windows, we were all three trapped, to put it mildly, in a...

by Luc Lang

True, we'd all overdone it with the blow, with joints as fat as cucumbers, and in the cabin we were seriously ripped, already in the wide blue yonder... but on the ground, earlier, we'd been clean, straight, planning the flight,...

by Kristin Kearns

I fell in love with a palindrome. His name was Otto and he was the same front and back, he had two identical faces, a matching set of scars, two penises, joints that bent either way. We had sex twice...

by T. Duncan Anderson

If all the cards are on the table, it was her idea to have the abortion. That I agreed—and paid for it—is secondary. Her abortion was a bar tab I felt obligated to pay. I paid in cash. "No-no," I...

by Joseph McElroy

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn't know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads. His little sister laid the table, the...

by E. C. Osondu

The bars favored by American oil workers in Port Harcourt were named after girls. The girls were retired prostitutes called club girls. Short and memorable names—Pat's Bar, Stella's Bar, Abby's Bar, Christy's Bar, etc. The oldest of them was Pat's...

The One and Only Circle: Paul Celan's Letters to Gisele

Introduction and Translation from the French by John Felstiner #5 / 7 October 1952 / Paris, 10 a.m. —Paul Celan to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Maia, my love, I wish I could tell you how much I want all this to stay,...

by Anthony Farrington

There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations...the sea and the waves roaring. —Luke 21:25 There are three miracles in this story. I had been teaching...

Issue 54

Rowing to Russia

by Ryan Effgen

Is Dog?

by Thomas E. Kennedy

5751

by Mary Marcus

Undertow

by Richard Wirick

Post-Partum

by Martha Schwendener

Urban Planning: Case Study Number Four

by Tim Horvath

Downward Drifting

by Patricia Schultheis

Max Frisch at the City College of New York, 1981: Introduction

by Mark Jay Mirsky

Five Ways My Wife Could Die

by Gregory Blake Smith

A Stain on the Sofa

by Kay Sloan

How to Raise a Positive-Thinking Baby

by Michael Poore

The Fires of Krypton

by Michael Poore

The Lord's Day

by Luc Lang

Face?

by Luc Lang

Lonely Tylenol

by Kristin Kearns

I Could Have Been a Great Father

by T. Duncan Anderson

No Man's Land

by Joseph McElroy

An Incident at Pat's Bar

by E. C. Osondu

The One and Only Circle: Paul Celan's Letters to Gisele

If You're Looking For a Sign

by Anthony Farrington