Dead Sea Sunrise from Masada, Israel by James A. Tweedie, Issue 11.
Check out these short story excerpts from Issue 11:
FICTION
Today is the day.
How appropriate that it should fall on my 18th birthday.
Today I am what the old world would have considered a man. An adult.
To be honest, I don’t feel any different from yesterday … you know, except for the understanding of today’s impending doom.
I am the youngest person on Earth. At least as far as I know. I would assume that if my parents managed to hide me, others are probably out there. Living in the woods and mountains like my parents and me. … READ MORE >
—Ryan Gutierrez, Thank You
Though she was wearing something other than that long-sleeved, silver gown flowing down to her ankles, it had to be her. Roy Patterson recollected some lines from her routine at the street festival:
“I call aloud in the street … at the gates of the city … come out from among those who hate knowledge, those who reject my advice …”
As best he could recall, her monologue had proceeded in that general direction. Now she was pulling open the door to a bar half a block ahead. Quickening his pace, Roy reached the door, reopened it, and followed her in. The place was dimly lit despite the lateness of the hour, strange environs indeed for a teetotaler. His eyes did a nervous one-eighty around the room, and then he spotted her. … READ MORE >
—Robert L. Jones III, At the Head of Every Street
The thick bars stood from ceiling to floor in the cell. There was no glinting from the metal bars, for they were not made of silver, aluminum, steel, or anything reflective. The bars were a dull black metal that neither rusted nor bent, no matter the force you hit them with. The space was solely darkness—emptiness, like that of a cave, where if one didn’t know the space as one who lived there, it was merely an unknown. There were no guards stationed near the cells of the prison. There didn’t need to be, for the prisoners maintained their own prisons soon enough after they were placed there. … READ MORE >
—Hannah Grace Greer, The Candle
It is the first time I’ve been outside in months. The birds squawk and howl as my neighbor runs a freight train over his grass. My lawn, on the other hand, has grown into a matted thicket of weeds, which have been burned into crisp spider legs by the southern sun. I shrug about it all and sip my unsweetened coffee. My grandson doesn’t know how I drink it this way. He comes by weekly to do the dishes and judge me. … READ MORE >
—Audrey Laine Streb, A Flower in the Thicket
The worst part was the smell. Of course, the pain was bad as well, but the smell was how people could tell I was unclean. My illness started when I was fourteen, one year after my first blood flow. There might have been signs it was coming—my monthly flows were always unpredictable—but my condition truly announced itself while I was helping my imma and sisters prepare dinner one night.
I felt a trickle down my thighs, and immediately took my hands off the bread I’d been preparing, and stepped back.
“Danita?” one of my sisters said. “Are you well?” … READ MORE >
—Morgan Want, The Healing of the Bleeding Woman
Why do they call this stuff discovery? Litigation, the law profs said, is about the search for truth. OK, so—truth? This crap’s a waste of time. I read a three-paragraph police report, pick out the names of the witnesses, and relist them under “Potential Witnesses the State May Call to Testify.” Any high schooler could have told you that without this form, but the rules say we gotta list them. So we do. … READ MORE >
—Tom Funk, Unholy Ghost
I was fly fishing high mountain streams and lakes on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.
When I’m camping, I get lonely because there’s not much to do by myself when it gets dark. So if there’s a café or bar nearby, I’ll usually spend a few hours nursing a beer and shooting the bull with whoever’s willing to talk.
This particular night I headed over to an old way station called Dick’s Place. The bar was dimly lit and nearly empty, but even that was going to be better than staring at the inside of a tent for four hours waiting to fall asleep. … READ MORE >
—James A. Tweedie, Marty
For the first time in three years, Mar’s loafers clicked up the stone steps of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church alone.
The wrought-iron door thundered shut as she stepped into the narthex and grabbed a liturgy booklet with a shaking hand. Taking a deep breath, she crept into the sanctuary and took a seat in one of the stiff wooden pews about halfway down the aisle.
Candles crackled from the altar painted Caribbean blue and decorated with gold stars. The thick, honeyed aroma of beeswax filled the room, and she fixed her gaze on the flames dancing on either side of the wooden communion table. Blinking a few times, she cleared the tears forming in her stormy gray eyes. … READ MORE >
—Emily Babbitt, Bread of Heaven
NONFICTION
I do not remember elegantly.
When I remember Mari, I think of a sleepover game far more anxious than any Truth or Dare. The stakes were high. Staring at the ceiling under Jem and the Holograms sleeping bags, we determined nothing short of the ownership of America.
I can’t fathom how we invented this domestic version of Risk, but one wakeful slumber party after another, we took turns claiming states as our personal possessions. We were eight-year-old colonialists. We were Laura Ingalls Wilder with an acquisitive streak. We were stressed out about the whole thing, but we couldn’t stop. … READ MORE >
—Angela Townsend, Forget Me Not
You
didn’t realize that you’d begin this essay talking about Grandma’s Boy from 2013. But alas, here you are. You couldn’t remember his real name even if someone promised to pay you. You only remember this:
Y’all had been college naptime buddies for a while (that’s the polite way to say it). It was around Christmas, or close enough to where both of you were sitting on the floor in your freshman dorm bedroom and he was helping wrap Christmas presents. He said something about his grandma, and BAM! The nickname Grandma’s Boy commenced. To be honest, how does one go so long sleeping with someone and not knowing their name? It gets to a point of no return. The no return where y’all get in bed, turning off the lone overhead light keeping you out of the darkness. … READ MORE >
—Tiffany Farr, Father-Daughter Dance
It was a typical gray Michigan mid-October day, and that night my dream was anything but colorless:
I’m rushing around sky blue hospital corridors and there aren’t any windows or a seat for me. Everyone is saving a seat for someone else, either by spreading a jacket across it, an arm across the back, or piling up with knapsacks and messenger bags. Nobody smiles.
And then I’m down in the crowded lobby, and there’s some light behind me so there must finally be a window, right? I’m sitting, no longer anxious, and not far off there’s a tall man with his back to me who’s in conversation with someone I can’t see. This other man reverently says, “Lord!,” and the man with his back to me moves slowly to the exit. He’s solid and tall, with glowing, long red hair. … READ MORE >
—Lev Raphael, Are We Made of Dreams?
Like many of you, our congregation celebrates Communion on the first Sunday of every month. This week we chose to use those little plastic cups that come prefilled with the “bread and cup.” As I was moving my journal to the seat beside me, I felt the hot slice that only a paper cut can deliver in such agonizing slow motion. The trickle of blood was just coming to the surface as the pastor, my husband, quoted from Hebrews 9:22, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.”
The oddity of the moment wasn’t lost on me. As I sat there looking at my fingertip-sized drop of blood, waiting for the body and blood to be passed around, that verse spoke to me. I was struck with a thought. Could not a single drop of Jesus’s blood have been enough to have redeemed mankind? Perhaps “just enough” shedding of blood could have occurred that didn’t require so much? … READ MORE >
—Jennifer Baker, Enough
Friday, 7:31 p.m.
Two women recline side by side in the bed. Mimi is drifting in and out of dreams—dreams of a life well spent, a life well loved. Their heads are pressed lightly against each other, gray and white hair curling around each other and tickling the other’s forehead, but their hands are more firmly intertwined. Silence often reigns, with conversation and noise filtering in from the rest of the crowded house, from people waiting their turn to sit with her, wait with her, be with her when the end does finally come. But for now, the two women just sit, one with a rattling breath and the other with even inhales that sometimes turn shaky on the exhale. … READ MORE >
—Angie Brady, Waiting on an Angel
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