by Tali Rose West Marlboros at Sunset I’ve started smoking again. Not a whole lot—I’m not a chain smoker or anything—but I like to have a reason to stand on my balcony overlooking the apartment pool and watch the sky. There’s this moment each day when the sun’s setting, just a second before the horrible […]
Tag: Fiction
by A. Molotkov Transfusion 1. Sarah The smell of rot is so pervasive it adheres to the inside of my nose and mouth. I force myself to ignore it. Impossible. The horizon is interrupted by the red glow of forest fires. The other woman’s face, too, is tinted red. She’s walked with me for a […]
by Christa Rohrbach The Other Side of a Fourth-Place Medal You are 18 months old when your first hairs sprout. Your mother is ecstatic when she sees them: three tiny, fair, and thin little hairs that were somehow able to pierce through the smooth porcelain of your scalp. She thinks maybe you will stop being […]
by Kris Norbraten They dragged the doll into the hot shower to get it back to life. Some semblance of life. It wasn’t exactly a doll or wasn’t supposed to be. It was supposed to be something more. Randi’s bare feet squeaked on the acrylic shower bottom. She’d gotten herself wedged into the stall, no […]
by Tom Houseman The Donor The girl’s name was Della. She sat across from them in a soft gray chair in the room the agency had set up for them, her black ballet flats pressed firmly into the carpet. She wore dark blue jeans and a maroon, three-quarter sleeve shirt. Her eyes were light […]
by Molly Bashaw How to Make a Rainbow Begin to imagine that your life is fantastic, no matter what happens next. Light a candle and let it burn until it goes out by itself. Give away the clothes and the mobile. Take the changing table extension off the drawers. You are not replacing anything, […]
by Alan Ackmann Cartography “The science of mapmaking, in the end, is the science of separating what is known from what has yet to be discovered.” — Fromner’s Comprehensive Atlas, 1978 It’s eleven-thirty at night in mid-November. Arthur and his wife Deb are staring each other down in a rest stop lobby somewhere in […]
by Shya Scanlon The Very Absence of Connection Glen couldn’t help thinking that if their roles were reversed, he’d be kicking Bob’s teeth in. Or at least failing at it. Bob wasn’t a big man but he looked strong, and besides he’d seen action in Vietnam. Not much you could do to a man who’d […]
by James Ulmer The Sighting On a bright fall morning in September, Austin Waller stepped across the parking lot toward the dry cleaner on Jackson Street. Pulling open the heavy glass door, he entered to find a black girl, eight or nine years old, seated on a stool behind the counter. Head down, the […]
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Clef by Melissa Goode
The bus runs down Broadway, from the Bronx through Harlem out to Bowling Green. I listen to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, beginning with “So What” and I will reach, “All Blues”. A man boards the bus, carries a little girl, about three years old, and he takes the steps one-two-three, sure. His height, his […]
I, Achilles Petrakakis, knowing death to be not far distant, take up my pen to write this account in the 79th year of my life, at my house in the village of Galatas on the island of Crete on the 17th day of May, 2007. For days, that May of 1941, the sky had been […]
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Summer Contest Issue Now Live
Summer’s growth…Autumn’s harvest! We’re happy to announce the winners of our summer contest – check them out below and click on the links to read their work. This was a special summer for us, as we tapped into our South Florida roots a little more and accepted poems written in English as well as Spanish. […]
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She the Apple
Kaylie Saidin After school ends at two-thirty and the bells ring out a long flat sound, stay-at-home mothers congregate in the parking lot outside the campus buildings. The mothers sign clipboards and collect their children, who pull their shirts and beg to stop for fast food on the way home. I watch out of the […]
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Street Parking
Ashley Hand I’m waitressing in the Adirondacks for the summer, at an A-frame lodge on the lake in Saint George. We seat guests on the wraparound porch in the afternoons, once the rainstorms make their promenade across the water and gust over the village. My shift starts at […]
After finding a decade-old letter in the Gulf Stream editorial office from an inmate asking about free journal samples for submission guidelines, Samantha Leon has teamed up with GS-affiliated and independent writers alike to contribute to prison education. Over the next few weeks, Leon will keep a PO Box open for book donations, which will […]
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