Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.

Excerpts:

Colleen Curran
The Dearborns Aren't Home
It seemed like Jessica and her husband had always lived on the outskirts of the life she really wanted even before they moved to Naperville.

Michael Parker
Interview by Andrew Scott
As for my ideas about writing, I hope they've evolved, though I think I've just built on what interested me in the first place, which is landscape and syntax on a technical level and the great gulf between our inner and outer lives on a thematic level.

Laura Valeri
Furniture
It was September 1979, the Pope had died, and a new one had been selected, and this, to Mamma, indicated time for change; it was a sign of things to come, hopeful things, things with a sacral direction.

Patricia Henley
Rocky Gap
Beth and Miri are her people and she chose the campsite next to them. She tosses the two-person tent like a pizza, and wham-o! They have shelter.

E.B. Johnson
Killer Heart
At first, the man in the toaster looks confused and sad. When Dooley picks up the appliance to study the face more closely, the man looks surprised, and Dooley throws the hot thing in the sink. Pink cushions of blister inflate on the tips of his fingers and he presses them into the cool fabric of his wet jeans.

Louis Gallo
Aliens
Bee's anxieties are normal next to those of Lea, and she will always live a calmer and more serene life than her sister, so I hesitate to tell her that we have just seen a UFO.

Paul Carroll
Blood Rush
I felt responsible. He saw me reading. He concluded my apparent happiness was in some part due to the stories available to distract me, and so he harried me into teaching him how to read.

Carol Bly
Therapist
In that town, "Refreshments," without the word "Light," meant coffee brewed on the spot by the principal's secretary and fresh cookies from the St. Fursey bakery. "Light Refreshments," on the other hand, meant cardboard-boxed cookies from the Super Valu.

Javier Marias
Interview by Eli S. Evans
Then there are some writers, the kind to which I belong, who don't have a map; the only thing we have is a compass. That means we, more or less, know where we're heading, where we want to go, but we don't know how, absolutely, and we find the river and the desert and cliff unexpectedly, and say, Oh, dear, a desert now, let's cross it.

Kurt Rheinheimer
Concussions
This is my mother, in 1952, standing at the edge of Oak Drive, leaning against one of the Armstrongs' twin Buicks. Ink-black, the Buicks are, with chrome portal trim and bumpers like liquid silver under the perfect blue sky.

E.B. Johnson Johnson, E. B.