W. had not noticed his wife for three days when he recalled that she had wandered out into the ice.

He was cold.  He was sitting where the mirrors are.  He looked for his face in the mirrors but he saw only a dark gray oval surrounded by lighter gray.  When he moved his head, the oval moved, so the oval, he concluded, must be of his making….

Eric G. Wilson has published three books of creative nonfiction with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Keep It Fake, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, and Against Happiness. His memoir, The Mercy of Eternity, was published with Northwestern UP. He has fiction with The Collagist, Cafe Irreal, Eclectica and his essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, The Oxford American, The Chronicle Review,  and Salon. He teaches at Wake Forest University.

It is 2014 and Greg Kinnear cannot feel sadness.

He cannot be sure, in the way that nobody can be sure of anything, the exact time he stopped feeling sadness. He is sure, in the way that anybody can be sure of anything, that the first time he recognized its absence was on March 23, 1998. It was the night of the 70th Academy Awards. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a gay artist in As Good as It Gets. If any role was going to win him an Oscar, it was this one…. PURCHASE THIS STORY BELOW.

Bradley Babendir is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Emerson College. His fiction and criticism has been published by or is forthcoming at Bookslut, The Collapsar, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

In the weeks Blake had been waiting for Tourniquet to call, the skeleton of an apartment building had been erected behind Blake’s tiny house. The steel beams threw twists of light across his bathroom and kitchen as if the cops were shining their flashlights through the windows looking for pot or stolen merchandise. In fact, it felt like the whole damn building was being built above him, hovering over his house like a spaceship. It was disconcerting, as Tourniquet would say. At least, that’s what he’d say these days. Disconcerting was Tourniquet’s new favorite word….

Josh Denslow’s stories have appeared in Third Coast, Black Clock, Cutbank, Pear Noir!, and Wigleaf, among others. He is a staff editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and an Associate Editor at Unstuck. He has written and directed five short films, and he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane.

My seven-year-old son Aaron sits coloring at the back of the conference room in the Mobile, Alabama, Hampton Inn. Aaron adds red to Jesus’ flashing robes as He throws the moneylenders out of the temple while I stack my official Awake and Aware relaxation recordings on the table in front of him. You’d think a twenty-first century kid would be involved with a game on his smart phone instead of with a Bible coloring book, but Aaron’s fundamentalist mother and new step-father don’t allow him electronics. No electronics, including TV is first on the list of rules I signed off on a week ago so they’d trust me to watch over my own son for the summer. Shelley and Rodney are on an “Evangelical Inspiration Cruise” along the coasts of Central and South America. By the time I return Aaron to his home in Pensacola, he’ll have witnessed Awake and Aware group hypnosis sessions in nearly two dozen Southern cities….

Gregory Wolos’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in A-Minor Magazine, JMWW, Yemassee, Post Road, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, The Baltimore Review, A cappella Zoo, Superstition Review, Jersey Devil Press, and many other journals and anthologies, both online and print. My stories have earned two Pushcart Prize nominations and have won both the 2011 New South Writing Contest and the 2011 Gulf Stream Award for fiction. Two recent collections were named as finalists for the 2010 and 2012 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. I live and write on the northern bank of the Mohawk River in upstate New York. For more information regarding publications and commendations visit: www.gregorywolos.com.

My next-door neighbor, Farley, and I don’t speak to each other. Two years ago he installed a wood-burning fireplace in his living room, and the fumes from it circulate through my house when the wind blows from the northwest. When standing on his porch I informed him of that fact, he responded from the darkness behind his barely ajar front door that the chimney was up to code, so fuck off….

Corey Mertes is a lawyer with an MFA in film and television from the University of Southern California. His short stories have been published in many journals, including Valparaiso Fiction Review, 2 Bridges Review, Green Briar Review, Bull: Men’s Fiction, The Prague Revue, Poydras Review and Hawai’i Review.