Katie Jean Shinkle Ruination Darkness, and then. Rolling weather: a superstorm in-wait. Four clouds exactly alike, black outline as if spiral on paper. Stratus or cirrus. Paredolia in theory: what becomes a creature of wing in sky, what becomes one blink signal or two, what becomes the shape of genitals. If we take our shoes […]
Category: Winter 2016 – Fiction
Adam Prince, “The Profane and the Sacred”
Adam Prince The Profane and the Sacred One time, my high school girlfriend wanted to shit on me. Or maybe she wanted to shit on me all the time, and here was the moment the thing was expressed. We were trading fantasies, one for one. And, really, I should have been cautious from the […]
Anne Valente, “Lullaby for Bullfrog”
Anne Valente Lullaby for Bullfrog Eastern American Toad (Bufo Americanus Americanus) A high-pitched trill, the singing of so many toads hidden in the grass. Emerged from the ponds of their late-spring breeding, unfurled to grasslands and forests and dense thickets of cattails. You remember them now, every toad and frog species in the state […]
Maria Kuznetsova, “The Storm”
Maria Kuznetsova The Storm That year, we had already missed over two weeks of school by the end of January. The snow just wouldn’t give up. It covered all the houses, the pine trees were flush with it, and even the creek where Lacy and I would go hunting for crawdads in the summer […]
Mika Taylor, “The Uncertainty Principle”
Mika Taylor The Uncertainty Principle I built my son a quantum booth from an old refrigerator box. I went all out, painted it up, glittered the top, strung rope for a doorknob. The inside was simple, matte black, no frills. I thought about adding buttons to press and pretend with, but the dark quiet […]
Michael Reid Busk – “Prince”
Michael Reid Busk Prince To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s words, used in a very different context: No one could ever forecast the actions of Prince; he was a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside a purple velvet enigma. Prince was a sparkly Sphinx, a funk-pop Mozart, a 5’2 totem of talent, a Christian sex god, the […]
