By Ellis Shuman I remember meeting Milena the day I rode on one of Sofia’s rusty orange trams for the first time. I remember boarding, searching for somewhere to validate my ticket. The ticket was a thin piece of paper,…

By: Anthony Ward             Will painstakingly painted the same scene over and over. Like Monet’s Rouen Cathedral. Except this was no cathedral. It was the stone wall that enclosed his own back yard at the end of the lawn behind…

By Ranjit Kulkarni Why did God give the human species the intelligence to invent the mobile phone? Sitting alone in a plush restaurant in despair, young Rakesh Oswal threw his phone away. Even in the AC of the restaurant, his…

By: Jim Bates The old man sat staring out the window of his apartment. The mask mandate had been lifted and people were flocking into the city’s streets to celebrate, some even dancing. He thought about his dear wife, lost…

By Harrison Abbott I was in home economics class in high school and there was this scary, chronically angry teacher called Mrs Grierson whom we all had to respect, for some reason, despite her shouty aggressive ways. I was bad…

By: Michael Degnan It was ten minutes before the bombs went off that Charles first saw her, the woman of his dreams, in a park in Washington DC. She sat cross-legged on the grass, strumming a guitar. A soft breeze…

By: Raymond Greiner The year is 1928, and the United States is suffering an economic depression. James Abernathy graduated from high school in Indianapolis, Indiana and awarded a scholarship at the Chicago Electrical Institute. James drove his Model T ford…

By: Jim Bates I’m a third generation Neon sign repairman. I live in southwestern Minnesota near the town of Wells in a singlewide trailer on land my great grandfather farmed. I live with my son Conner and I’m teaching him…

By: David Leonard “I’m telling you this bitch will blow us both,” Devon told his buddy Tommy just before huffing one of two lines of coke he’d just finished meticulously chopping into as fine a powder as his debit card…

By Harrison Abbott He didn’t seem like a degenerate when I married him. He used to be sweet and funny. We tried to have a baby; I couldn’t conceive, and I think he was silently angry about that. In our…