Claudine falls back on the bed and thinks about her lies. Not all of them – just the big ones. Starting with Thursday night out with the girls. I’m young, she’d told John a few months after they’d gotten married. Those two words – I’m young – virtually guaranteed that she would win the argument, so long as they weren’t talking about money. Claudine never won an argument that involved their finances, so she had stopped trying. John gave her everything she needed, more or less….

Michael Landweber is the author of the novel, We (Coffeetown Press, 2013). His stories have appeared in American Literary Review, Gargoyle, 14 Hills, Fugue, The MacGuffin and other places. He is an associate editor at Potomac Review and a contributor for Pop Matters. Find out more at mikelandweber.com.

The double moonlit world vanished.

I collapsed in spiky grass. Later, I woke gummy mouth’d, covered in dew.

A lemon sun blinked strange through the trees. Everything was colored-in sloppy with fluorescent markers. My familiar chalky dullness, gone.

I smacked my head. This new world remained….

Bud Smith works heavy construction in New Jersey. His books are the novels Tollbooth; F-250; the short story collection Or Something Like That; and the poetry collection Everything Neon. He lives with his wife in New York City, between a hospital and a bridge. www.budsmithwrites.com.

Before all the blood cooled, Eve frantically swept her hut of Cain and Abel’s dirt. As always, a strip of dirt refused the dustpan and was absorbed into the skin of each passing guest’s feet. The bodily sheddings of the two brothers were thus brought to each quarry, each cliff-top, and each parched shore that a haunted man dragged himself to colonize. Along the way, the two brothers were blown into the winds from the skins of the scattering men into all the hard nooks and dank crevices of Earth until all tribes were carriers. The marrow of Cain’s femur sullied the rust on a stake piercing the Lord’s weaker hand. Abel’s ridged toenail tickled the meditating Buddha’s squat nose under a fruit tree. The north end of a frizzled hair of Cain will, next year, nudge the weft in an enfeebled glacier’s grain melting across Alberta, but the south end of the hair bent the pitch of the rich magistrate’s slurped oyster as he leaned over his friend’s unpainted table in Amsterdam the day they exchanged seventy-three slaves….

Nat began writing as an undergraduate at Harvard. Since graduating in 2011, his fiction has appeared in such publications as Juked, Gulf Stream, and Hobart. He lives in Brooklyn.

  Dear Friend, As I write, a group of civilized men stand outside of my cell, readying to put me in an adult-sized onesie and infantilize me back into the world. How did it come to this? In the old world, parole was the impossible dream whispered on the lips of every convict. Now it …

Continue reading “Two Years Before the Rattle”

One fall afternoon this bejeweled lady stepped into my restaurant and asked if we served Negroes. Her necklace, earrings, and broach looked heavy for midday wear, but they were real. God knows I’ve seen enough of the costume variety, always overdone and usually overbearing. Me, I’m barebones, one gold ring, even between husbands….

Merle Drown is the author novels, Plowing Up A Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs Of Heaven (Soho Press). Merle has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council and teaches in Southern NH U’s MFA program. Pieces from a collection-in-progress, Shrunken Heads, miniature portraits of the famous among us, have appeared in Amoskeag, Meetinghouse, Night Train, The Kenyon Review, Rumble, Sub-Lit, Word Riot, Bound Off, JMWW, Eclectica, Toasted Cheese, Foliate Oak, SN Review, Bartleby Snopes, (Short) Fiction Collective, and 971 Menu. Whitepoint Press will publish his new novel, Lighting the World, in March 2015.