By: Matt Nagin All day the phone rang. Bill Cartwright owed everyone: Wells Fargo, Visa, Home Depot, even a gastroenterologist on Madison Avenue who charged exorbitant prices for the snazziest colonoscopy in town. Bill intended to pay them all back….

By: Dennis Vannatta They’re our secret desires, Freud said of dreams.  If so, why does this endless night of dreams keep bringing me to such wretched places?  Empty streets under dour gray skies in one. Heat and dust in another. …

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…