Category / Fiction

The Beautiful Pilot

By Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Came to sit with us at the Thursday afternoon wine tasting on the patio in the small town where we live in the PNW. Little buildings with white shutters and red doors, and right in back of that… the sea. It’s a Melville novel kind of place that might make you feel special at first glance or on your first couple of visits. Shops with sea glass and beachy type art made of driftwood and seashells and the kinds of things you think you’ll want in Waltham, Massachusetts, but you’ll schlepp it all home on the plane and realize you don’t want it and it was just the ambiance that wowed you. The promise of living by the sea in a faraway place on an island accessible only by ferry, and where – you think to yourself – things will be kinder and easier. You think that, but you’ll turn out to be wrong. It’s a very white people place with practical REI sandals and no makeup and cargo shorts and windbreakers, where you say hello to people on the street and they look away and zip up their parkas.

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Thaumaturgy

By Shari Lane

The day the bird landed on her head, Caia was looking the other direction.

She was walking across the Hawthorne bridge, late for work again. (The really unique, spectacular thing would be for Caia not to be late, to stroll into the office at exactly 8:30, or maybe 8:25 even, with a look of casual triumph, as if it was perfectly normal to show up at the expected time, get a cup of coffee, hang up the lavender pea coat she’d bought at the consignment shop, and push the Power button on the computer with a satisfied smirk as if she, Caia, owned the morning instead of the other way around.)

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The Promise

By Lorna Reese

A month before she died, Joan Lassiter asked her best friend Phyllis McGowan to marry her husband Jerome after she was gone. They had no children and he would need looking after, she told Phyllis. Promise me, she pleaded.

Now at the memorial reception at Phyllis’s house – Jerome said his house down the block still smells of sickness — Phyllis is putting away a plate of cheese and cold cuts when she senses more than hears Jerome’s voice in the living room go quiet. Most guests have already left or are busy gathering their things and she has begun cleaning up. She doesn’t know the remaining visitors but is familiar with Jerome’s unusually sonorous voice. It always carries.

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The Invisible Man

By Russ López

And never forget that being invisible kept my abuelo, your great grandfather, from being deported during the Depression. They were grabbing people off the sidewalks of Los Angeles to send back to Mexico. They didn’t care if you were a citizen or not. If they saw a brown person, they put them on a train and sent them south.” As always when she talked about the dead, she crossed herself. “We have long survived by being invisible.”

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Where All Your Travels End

By Michael Washburn

These visions do not torment you forever, as ever more immediate threats emerge to the tidy reality you made your home, where the river that appealed and beckoned to you had a discrete character and could never, to use a maladroit phrase, overstep its bounds. It is a river and it does what rivers do. The river has summoned you to come to it and if you lived a million years you might not, without the clarity of this dream, envision a scenario where the river comes to you. Now things are more fluid and the water knows no bounds at all . . .

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A Change in Rhythm

By Lita Kurth

He lingered by the curtains. A flicker in his pupils told of firelight and sadness. The dark-haired woman shivered. The room, the night, despair: a drink that’s served straight up. She tendered a quivering finger at Johnny in the mirror. His reflection hovered, higher, lower. “It’s one way to escape.”

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Contact

By Lena Fultz

Parker’s caked himself in applesauce again.

Jamie had asked her mother to stop giving him the stupid squeeze packets each time they visited, now that he’s started refusing to eat applesauce from a spoon—only from the packets, even if they cost more at the grocery store. But today, again, as she was buckling her one-year-old son back into his car seat, her mother had come rambling down the front porch steps and shoved another into his grubby hands.

“Just one for the road,” she’d insisted, a semi-innocent smile on her face. “He didn’t eat much dinner.”

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The Littoral Zone

By Margo McCall

When Angie awoke that first morning at Lazlo’s, she left him sleeping and went for a walk on the beach. Sensations bombarded her as she walked barefoot over the damp sand, breathed the dank ocean, felt the vibration of waves crashing in from the other side of the world.

A father and son played paddleball in the mist, their happiness fluttering birdlike in the air. Gray-haired men sat on benches drinking coffee, and another stood motionless as a rock, staring out to sea, ankles buffeted by sea froth.

Angie had the strong sense they were waiting to die, like the beach was some ante room filled with mortal pleasures to keep them occupied while they waited.

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Pink Night Sky

By Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

Fights in multiples a month, the consistency of the painful words almost felt like a friend — a relief when the flood finally occurred.

Anger grows when fed, so I sat in silence. You’re so manipulative. I’m not falling for this act. The words flowed over me, but I thought, we can still salvage the evening.

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