“When Russell drove the fog truck, he didn’t use the siren. Lights only, an orange throb, while the smoke to kill mosquitoes gusted from a nozzle in the truck bed.”
Fiction
Sandwichboy
“There was an attempted robbery last night,” Toby’s father said. “And your mother took out a gun and she misfired it. Into my leg.”
Ludwig I
“Horseshit,” whined Penny. “Actually, Penny, Jereme Michalek worked primarily with orangutang excrement on account of the anthropomorphic …” Penny’s teacher trailed off. She didn’t have a clue what she meant. She had dreamt of being a ballet dancer, a tailor, a docent at a hot, seafaring museum. And now she was splitting hairs about turds.…
The Collected Lecture Notes of David Edgarstein
I have been asked to talk to you about endings. But I cannot speak of endings any more than a gravedigger can speak of the afterlife. That is to say, I can speak of endings with a special authority as husband to their symbolic play in the world of the literal. There. You have your…
Stuck in the Middle with You
Dear Mr. Edgarstein, I’m really on it this time. I’m just one introduction away from writing the next great American short story. I have a contact at n+1 who is really excited about it. See, I have this idea to write a story that doesn’t start or finish, so to speak, but just continues. By being purely…
Burnt Words
In red ink the letter asked, WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, WILL YOUR SIGNAL BE STRONG ENOUGH TO RECEIVE IT?
The Totality of Things
Dear Brian Powell, I have something I’d like you to consider for your next film. You have always been about envelope pushing, pulling, mauling and disemboweling and, if I do say so myself, this piece drips envelope viscera. It’s a rough refutation of conventional ontology. INT. HOSPITAL ROOM – NIGHT The Spin Doctors’ immortal Two…
That Which Practices Before Praxis (or, The Spoliation of Horseface Jones)
Dear Micah, We received your submission for publication in The Glasgow Review of Modern Deontological Inquiry. Your piece, I Am that I Am or that which Practices Before Praxis, will unfortunately not be appearing in our October quarterly. Though, we are always supportive of inventive style through which to plumb the depths of contemporary normative…
Home Improvement
Dear Babes in Wolfland, I write to you as an insulted and eracinated consumer of your music. Having been weened — culturally and spiritually, not infantiley — on Babes in Wolfland music, your new EP came as an unwelcome rape to my fragile aesthetic sensibility. See, when I was ten I scraped together enough coin…
Conceited, Just Like the Semiotician Ordered
Patriarchal. Orientalistic. Subaltern-slut-shaming. What else can be said about the trash coitus of bad taste and indecency that was Hoomer Shoman’s latest crap of fiction. Reprinted in its entirety: Rico Hettinger was a kind authoritarian. Rico deigned to chat with blacks. But this story isn’t about him. See, Rico never plowed a plot of land…
Big Bad Love
“Then we lie in her twin bed, facing each other. We alternate closing our eyes, looking at each other in turns. Next month, she’ll go to court and testify against her father.” By Mary Miller
The Buddhist
“Whatever we said, they were real punks. They had that filthy purity. All of us skaters thought that we were punks, renegades, whatever . . . But we knew what we were.” By Stefan Milne
Dying for a chance to run the country
Letters to the Editor: Bravo. You have published what is — without doubt — the artsiest dropping of atrocious shit-lit. Reprinted in its entirety from your Spring Quarterly: The results were in. The idiot boy had been elected President. The smallish boy with a peach-on-the-pavement face, a tremendous lisp, and a violent self-hatred was the…
Heddon Lucky 13
“Guilty? I asked and squinted, held my hand over my eyes, shielding the sun. I decided his lips were loamy; full and dirty.” By Shelagh Power-Chopra
Barnegat Bay
“Only a few times, she said, because Tara’s son had wanted to play hostage. He’d had a ball of twine and wanted to tie her to a chair.” By Sarah Malone
Out of the Wreckage
“By lunch time, Stella’s cheek had swollen, pink with her mother’s handprint. From his end of the kitchen table, Stella caught her daddy look at the warm mark, but he said nothing . . .” by Ethel Rohan