By: Don Tassone Bone-tired and drenched in sweat, the old man sat down on a landscape boulder under the cool shade of an oak tree in his backyard. Catching his breath, he looked down at his dirty hands…
By: Donald Lee A pep rally was scheduled for Saturday ahead of Collegiate Prep’s boys’ basketball championship game but for now the students straggling into Ms. Burke’s AP Calculus class for first period were still half asleep. Students were free…
By: Yurii Tokar It doesn’t matter why the trim, fifty-eight-year-old Sergei Viktorovich Krapchishin, in an elegant dark-gray suit, an ironed white shirt, and polished black leather shoes, unexpectedly found himself, on a spring morning in 2025, on a narrow,…
By: William Kitcher Olivia’s hours at the hospital were cut back, and Ignacio didn’t get the raise he was expecting, so they decided to rent out their spare bedroom. They were in their early forties and saving for a house…
By: Black Edward The June cold had settled properly over Glen Norah. It crept through jackets and sat quietly in your bones. Along Kunzekweguta Road, the usual smell of burst sewage floated above the potholes and open drains. Most people…
By: Philip Graubart The Hamas delegate stepped to the podium. He wore a checkered Palestinian keffiyeh, tight black jeans, a Grateful Dead t-shirt and shiny white New Balance sneakers. He grinned, loving the attention. His fake Arab pronunciation was not…
By Mark Salamon The soul, too, has its geometric center, and those wise enough not to search for it often find it all the same. The wound of initiation: at times something to conceal, at others an ornament, until one…
By: Don Tassone Ever since she was a little girl, Stella’s favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz. But her favorite part of that movie wasn’t the characters or costumes or special effects. It was its most famous line: …
By: Andy Marin He feels like a fool as people walk by him and into the subway station. He bites his lip and swallows. He would light a cigarette but he doesn’t want to put off passersby who find smoking…
By: Ian C Smith I wanted to defeat time visiting the boyhood manor of my father, that remote relation, who fled the travails of his life by emigrating. Envisaging touring his biography that nobody would write I thought, so old,…