Daniel Couch 11/1/25 Daniel Couch 11/1/25

Sinkhole

Containment percentages, mass layoffs, budget shortfalls, 9-1-1 hold times: The sinkhole felt like another in a long list of calamities we’d learned to accept.

Mary Grimm 11/1/25 Mary Grimm 11/1/25

Two Pieces

“Make me a promise,” she said to him when they were lying in bed, although it was not night, and he said, “What promise?” and she said, “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

Sean Thomas Dougherty 11/1/25 Sean Thomas Dougherty 11/1/25

I Am in a Room Alone

with the only music of the morning traffic, those who must rise to drive to labor, and a window often curtained and closed, and in winter, the radiator hissing, the kind from another century, the kind you must be careful or it will burn you.

Heikki Huotari 11/1/25 Heikki Huotari 11/1/25

Lunar Logic

There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession.

David Daniel 9/18/25 David Daniel 9/18/25

Spells

On Christmas Eve as teens, we amble Georgetown’s lamplit streets, fingers linked, kissing, your upper lip prickly with that faint mustache some girls get. Your dad is a basement shut-in, a bald guy with myalgia.

Rhett Milner 8/1/25 Rhett Milner 8/1/25

Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more Walleye than they bothered to count.

Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh 8/1/25 Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh 8/1/25

Aab

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together.

Stevie doCarmo 8/1/25 Stevie doCarmo 8/1/25

Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care.