Category: Short Story
-
Tornadoes Can’t Hurt Us on Wednesdays by Francis Felix Rosa
Twigs snapped underfoot as he trudged towards a patch of thistles and milkweed huddled down the slope. Stalks reached up, cracking open the robin’s-egg blue sky, and fronds loomed, forging a place of dark shade and silence. It made Tanner jumpy, but that was nothing new. The jumpiness was a…
-
The Last Memory by M.G. Allan
Anna Vanderhoof turned her head on the pillow and saw herself standing by the bed. Not herself as she was now, old and frail and bedridden, but a ghost of her younger self. The flaming red hair and color-filled cheeks, sparkling green eyes and strong straight posture of her…
-
Two Women by Toshiya Kamei
The silence in their apartment was heavy, packed with twenty years of things they hadn’t said. Emi and Kenji moved around it like two practiced dancers, their choreography perfected by routine. He would read the newspaper at the small kitchen table; she would pour his genmaicha, the roasted aroma a…
-
Finally Finding Thoreau by Jim Bates
When we were kids, my best friend Jerry and I spent as much time as we could walking the fields and woods a few miles from where we grew up in a small town in west-central Minnesota. We liked to pretend we were out there with our hero, Henry David…
-
It’s Hard for Me to Tell My Brother I Love Him, So Instead I Write a Story by Alice Kinerk
The word addiction comes from Latin. It means to surrender. A drug addict is a person who has given over his or her life to a substance, who has given drugs the helm. The first time my brother went to rehab, he was fifteen and I was six. I…
-
The Blue Binder by Jonathan Ferrini
Victor grew up inside a trailer park with dilapidated trailers packed together like tuna in a rusty old can. His grandmother’s trailer smelled of cleaning supplies; the scent she brought home from cleaning offices overnight. She raised Victor alone after his mother abandoned him for a life as a hippie…
-
Johnny Ace at the Pearly Gates by Jeffrey Hantover
Johnny Ace (John Marshall Alexander, Jr.)December 25, 1954 The last week in December was always a busy period for St. Peter. Many of the infirm and the aged who willed themselves to make it to Christmas expired a day or two after the holiday having triumphantly crossed the finish line.…
-
Two Black Dresses by Jonathan Ferrini
Every day at three o’clock as the afternoon sun fought through the dusty windows and the high school down the street let out, a teenage girl would slip quietly into the boutique. She never spoke, never bought anything, just wandered to the same rack and lingered over a particular black…
-
Devotion by Huina Zheng
She used to believe. Obedient, gentle and considerate since childhood, Ling washed dishes, mopped floors, folded laundry, and cared for her younger brother, doing everything her parents expected. But now, for the first time, she began to doubt. She stared at the phone in her hand. Her mother’s voice still…