Saramanda Swigart/Fiction
She listened until she could hear the objects in the room hum. The gilt plates, impressed with hunting scenes from the Shahnameh, hummed a rich bass. The archeologists had gasped when they saw she’d set the table with them. They’d put on their gloves so the oil from their hands wouldn’t touch the gold, and rushed them back to her father’s study, and closed the glass over them.
Savage Mountain/John Smelcer
Sebastian wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t just climb back up to the top. Once he stood on the crest, his brother’s weight would pull him off the north side of the mountain. He certainly couldn’t cut the rope. Sebastian slowly formed a plan and began climbing toward the top of the crest. When he was close, he hammered a piton into the rock face and connected himself to it with a carabiner and a short piece of rope; anchored that way, he couldn’t be dragged off the other side.
Karen Schubert/Fiction
The blueberry ginger muffins were still warm, so I’d left the basket uncovered. I was balancing it and a thermos of coffee with one hand, using the other to get around a box that was nearly wide and long as the entryway. I called halloooo! Lee came in with a handful of socks, dropped a shot glass into each one, and stuffed them into the enormous box between a bag of rice, a rag rug and a few couch pillows…
Mollie McNeil/Fiction
I want to say I have a lot of brothers inside with sharp knives and baseball bats, but I can’t. I’m no good at lying. Pluto should bite him, but he just thumps his tail on the concrete pavement like we are old pals. More tears stream down my face. I can’t stop them.
João Cerqueira/Fiction
“The majority of mankind seems to believe in something more than chemical transformations,” Jesus said.
“Have you ever known anyone to rejoice in death?”
“The death of a human being almost always causes suffering to family and friends…”
“Couldn’t it be that they suspect that there’s nothing after that?” Magdalene asked.
“What’s the point in living if you believe in nothing?”
DIRT/Fiction
All eyes were on Miss McBride whose smile split down the middle, so that it looked like she had two faces glued together. While the right side kept a tight grip on bliss, the right eye held up by a twitching wall of muscle, the left eye sank into its socket, drowning in a pool of tears, the sadness spilling down the cheek that collapsed beneath it in an avalanche of skin…
Fiction/Kristen Clanton
Before she was found beneath the interstate, her face half-missing, her body stripped clean, except for the fingers with their golden rings, Destiny’s mother stayed busy. It was in the audience of men…
Night in Bishkek / William T. Hathaway
He looked out over the sprawling Central Asian capital and the Kyrgyz Air Force base across the street. At the corner a metal gate had been blown open. It had been part of a walled perimeter, had blocked a road leading into the base. Next to the guard house lay a soldier, chest dark with blood, a stubby rifle strapped across it. Two trucks—a pickup and a semi—were driving over the runway. A machine gun was sandbagged atop the cab of the pickup, and the men behind it wore ski masks and long robes in the eighty-degree heat. He moved toward the door. To defend her, he had to get the rifle…
Mitch James / Fiction
We’ve been waiting for the world to end now for seven months, three days, and twelve hours. We know how we’ll go. Our life now is preparing for it, yet I don’t even look up to see it anymore…