Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.

Brad Beauregard
What's Kept
"You're old enough to already know this," my grandfather said, "but things don't always work out. Sometimes you try as hard as you can, for as long as you can, and things just don't end up the way you want them to."

Silas Dent Zobal
The Hospital
Evelyn said, Dick wants to know what you have been doing that Maddy had a stroke, and I said, Jesus Christ. She said, Dick says this might be some lifestyle thing, and I said, Put Dick on the phone, and she said, Hold on.

Syed Ali Haider
Scheherazade
"We all believe in Jesus, but Muslims--like you and I--believe that Jesus was one step on the way to the prophet Muhammad."

Edwin Rozic
Specimen Cases
He slammed on the brakes and we all lurched forward. There's a spot, he said in Croatian--he always spoke Croatian when driving or swearing--and then he maneuvered the car into a narrow swatch of curb. At his funeral years later, I remembered that he was an excellent parker. Any spot, he could park the car in one sweep.

Kim Brooks
A Man Escaped
Then in October, a colder, grayer October than usual that year, two events colluded at the height of his malaise that forced him to take charge of his life.

Matt Bondurant
Interview by Lori Ann Stephens
My basic strategy was to take the handful of actual historical truths that we had knowledge of, things that were documented in newspapers and court transcripts for example, and then use them as sort of points in constellation, connecting the dots to other events, trying to account for the space between in a dramatically interesting, historically possible way.

Matthew Vollmer
The Young Men of the Academy
The particulars of our education would--years later--escape us. Eskers, gaskets, covalent bonds, and dependent clauses--the definitions and rules governing these concepts had trickled through the sieves of our minds.

Michael Horton
I'd Save the Children
I love my wife best, but I'd save the children. If I had to.

J. A. Howard
The Way It Is Around Here
The calves should have been sold already, but people tried to stretch it out, gamble on the prices, see how much more money they could get from the feedlots. The separation would be worse for the mothers now.

Nic Brown
Life Drawing
"You've been talking about it?" Maria says.
Jack shrugs and exhales a spiraling ring of smoke.
"Then you tell me," Maria says. "Both of you. What do you want?"
"I want to have a thousand grandchildren," her mother says. "I want to live forever."

Raymond Philip Asaph
Sister of the Bees
Unfortunately, I was with Frenchy, whose manners were stuck in a jungle. One of those guys who'd been handed a flashlight and a forty-five, then sent down holes to check for Charlie, French wasn't too good with people.

Anne Walsh Miller
The Rickman Digression
And, as Claire's dad likes to point out, there are no atheists in a foxhole. That was true of everyone in the building. None of them were religious, but they weren't atheists either.

Edwin Rozic Edwin Rozic