by BRANDON TIMM Failing deodorant hung thick around Lisa as she fought through the surging crowd around the zoo’s tiger exhibit. God, she could taste the people baking in the sun. Their sweat, their excitement, every expectation gliding salty over … Read more

by NIELS RINEHART “I’m telling you, I’ve been looking at that cigarette on the window sill since I got moved to this cell five years ago.” The new kid sat on the opposite bunk, holding the cigarette in the palm … Read more

Congrats to Dennis McFadden, the winner of the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. His story “Dancing O’Hanlon” is featured in CQ 66.1!

by ROBERT DALL The address was somewhere near Newtown Creek, in the borderlands between Queens and Brooklyn but also between rebirth and decay: abandoned warehouses, chop shops, and fuel tanks slowly giving way to row houses, burger joints, and bodegas. … Read more

by MARK JACOBS A bunch of noisy goddamn ducks were flying over the hospital as the orderly wheeled Glynda’s wheelchair out to the taxi. Geese, probably they were geese. Whatever. The orderly was a studly black guy named Lorenzo. No … Read more

by LINDA WOOLFORD From below the water’s surface, Sammy saw a smear of sky. It was like looking through the glass-top coffee table he hid beneath to get his breath when it felt like war all around him. Here, underwater, … Read more

by SHELLY WEATHERS I was sent down the street with a bottle of mentholated liniment to give to Mrs. Jesop for her spider-bitten leg. “Mrs. Jesop?” I whispered or mouthed through the screen door from her front stoop. It was … Read more

FICTION by AMY SAVAGE
When I went in for my hysterectomy, I flirted with the nurses. Though I appreciate the female form, I was not aroused by their competence and clogs. They were required to serve me and I was required to accept their service…

FICTION by SARAH EARLE ZÁHORÍK
I don’t have an appetite for the lamb shanks, too humid, but the vinho verde is delicious. I put down my fork. Joel pours me another glass; he’s procured the whole bottle, “for the table” he’d said grandly, placing it in reach of the tottering white-haired ladies to my left, and the three surely-lacross-players to his right, slugging beers. Joel smiles. He doesn’t even like white wine, but there it is. For me.

FICTION by JERRY WHITUS
There was to be a wedding at the old Bethel Church, which seemed peculiar. As far as Edith knew, nothing happened there these days except club meetings or funerals for families with plots in the church’s ancient cemetery. Then came a jolt, the bride’s maiden name—Cotterill.

Edith spread the paper, The Sour Springs Record, on her kitchen table, so a strip of sunlight fell over a picture of the bride, shown standing alongside a horse. A handsome girl with a self-assured smile, dark hair that disappeared behind her shoulders. Raised in Houston, the article said, her father in investments, her mother some sort of artist who ran a gallery. A grandfather, Eldon Cotterill, now of Beaumont, had grown up in the Sour Springs community. No mention of the man’s wife, but there was timberland and an old homestead on a lake in the Thickets. Among the bride’s passions was historical preservation, and thus her fascination with the little church, which her grandfather’s father had helped build “the way they did in those days.”