Short fiction by Jayne Anne Phillips from our Summer 2015 issue.
He saw bits and pieces that winter in the newspapers, accounts he could partially make out, but always the same photographs: the children, the dog, the women, the round face in the cell, beaten about the eyes. Some folk from town or maybe a local reporter stuffed coverage in their mailbox at the end of the road.
A story by Manuel Gonzales from our Summer 2016 issue.
Not that if I’d known how much my grandma loved her frozen yogurt I wouldn’t have brought her some froyo every now and then, which was the other thing I was thinking, which was why I said, “Well, yeah, Mom, of course. You know how much I love Grandma,” which wasn’t a lie exactly because when I thought of her, I loved her, just that I didn’t really ever think of her.
Short fiction by C. E. Morgan from our Spring 2014 issue.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, because it’s not politically correct to say, but it takes courage to kill something—you risk remorse, and remorse sticks.
A short story from our Summer 2016 issue.
Danny Pocock was a prophet. He read omens and suffered what he called the burden of deep understanding. It showed in his posture. He said I was hopeless as a mystic, but there were other things he could teach me.
It’s a kind of parlor game, a question someone asks at the after-party, perhaps, lounging on couches, shoes off, everyone half-drunk and one-quarter enamored and not ready for the long night to die. What’s your hidden talent? This is no invitation to brag—I got straight A’s in college, I can bench-press 220. Oh no no no, you win this game by trotting out your most bizarre and useless skill.
A short story from the Summer 2013 issue.
Swansea said he’d never cried, not even when he was a kid, because it’s such a false and easy way to the thing that’s eating you. Like crying is too simple for real sadness.
Fear, though. We know about fear. It makes a hot rush out of my head when it comes on, and I can’t be held responsible.
Threadgill had been one of them, or something like it. This part of the world hadn’t been penetrated by the Company in four seasons, ever since they lost him, their ace drummer, on the Blackwater River, where he’d been shot off a farmer’s wife by the farmer himself.
A guy on the local news said most gas stations lowered their prices at nine in the morning and raised them at four, something about fucking over people who’d already driven to work and drivers who didn’t leave their cubicles until dusk. He didn’t exactly use those words, but any rational cynic knew what he meant.
Thunder rattles the windows, and Lucy wakes from a restless sleep, thinking of her husband. Five days ago she gave birth in the squash patch, but for now she ignores everything else, preferring the satisfaction of old memories knocking against one another. Let the baby wait. Everyone on the other side of that bedroom door can just wait.
A story from the Spring 2016 issue, excerpted from The Sport of Kings.
Up city, up boomers, up commerce, uphill the city is built. All the hands of Bucktown come to build it.