by CHRISTOPHER RING Dry lightning lit on a ridge five miles off just as Jules crouched down to urinate. By sheer luck she had squatted on the southwest corner of the tower. Nothing told her to look that way, butshe … Read more

by NICHOLAS LEPRE They searched for Francine every Thursday afternoon, after school, in the hidden spaces of the neighborhood. They were halfway to the reservoir, the September sun at their backs, the green leaves beginning to brittle. Kenna in her … Read more

by JAMES ELENS The storm washed away the town on a Sunday. Moselle lay on the eastern end of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya swamp basin, fifty miles south of New Orleans. The whole town was only a dozen homes perched lined along … Read more

by JOHN HAGGERTY At 3:55PM I close the Threat Desk. I say “close” in the interests of accuracy, because at the inception of the Threat Desk program, when we were given a generous selection of models and options to choose … 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

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.”

FICTION by TAD BARTLETT
It’s a Saturday in January, late morning, as Joe Alsobrook slides down the gully side into the creek bottom and hikes far up the creek by himself, a second-hand coat keeping him warm, and a hat that smells like camphor. It’s 1983, a new year, and Joe is eleven years old and lives with his mother and father and two older sisters in their small town in a small house with dirty green shag carpets, peeling linoleum in the kitchen, and an ever-present smell of dog piss. But the house is a good house because it sits next to the gully with the hardwood bottomland and the creek running through it.

FICTION BY WARREN JONES
The voice-over from channel seven said, “The Pick-Four number for Friday night, September 25, 2009, is zero, three, seven, five.”
Ed almost leapt from his sofa. “We’re rich, Mister Brown, we’re rich!” His house mate, a large Chocolate Lab, lifted his head, yawned widely and eyed Ed skeptically. “Okay, not really. But hey—a thousand bucks isn’t exactly chump-change, is it, big guy?” Ed ruffled Mister Brown’s ears and turned back to the television. There she was, Lady Luck, in another ad for the Virginia State Lottery.