by KEN DERRY To hear author Ken Derry reading this piece, check out the latest episode (Episode 3: Real/Fantastical—Fantastical/Real) of our podcast, CQ Speaks. — When Ms. Martin first heard the discharge and shattered glass, she did not pause to consider … Read more

by MATT WHELIHAN Ed had sat through two days’ worth of speakers and breakout sessions at the hotel. He’d eaten the dry chicken and butter-slicked green beans served in tinfoil trays. He’d slept in the hotel bed with its pillows … Read more

by NORA BONNER No more breath for him now: lungs deflated, spirit departed. I had a week left in seventh grade. Evening after evening I walked four doors down to check for Greg’s television in the side room, and evening … Read more

by PAUL BLOM, Fiction Co-Editor Kathleen McNamara is the first-place winner of the The Carolina Quarterly’s recent fiction contest, “Wake, and Dream Again.” Our editors here at the CQ selected the finalists, and among those finalists, author Daniel Wallace selected the … Read more

by KATHLEEN SANDS Otabenga stood and spoke with purpose: “I will undergo both trials on the same day.”   Under his prestigious hat of spotted fur, Old Liboyo lowered his forehead. “That would be too much pain at once. Let … Read more

by CAROLINA HOTCHANDANI The trees, the redwoods, waving, skimmed her thought of the trees the way the wind grazed the canopy of the forest. Some trunks creaked, while her mind fell quiet, heightening to the falling capacity of trees that … Read more

by STEVE PEET The boy lay in a dried out wallow beneath freshly cut rhododendron boughs. To passersby, had there been any, it was an ordinary brush pile worthy of no notice whatsoever. Except for a fuzzy pink hippo seizing … Read more

by JOHN MARCHINKOSKI The man on stage can’t explain how it feels to burn. Nothing describes the sensation well enough. The fluorescent stage lights overhead remind him of the burning. He considers invoking them, but the audience doesn’t know their … Read more

by DAVID JACOBS Have you heard about the lake in Tanzania that’s so alkaline it preserves the bodies of dead animals in a calcified state, fixing them in a lonely permanence? Or the rare autoimmune disease that turns soft tissue … Read more

by BENJAMIN J. MURPHY Rebecca Kauffman. The Gunners. Counterpoint Press, 2018, pp. 224. Mikey is going blind, but he is our window into the small realism of Rebecca Kauffman’s second novel, The Gunners (Counterpoint Press, 2018). Though Mikey is apprehensive … Read more