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Check out these short story excerpts from Issue 14:
FICTION
Clouds lie low over a field, thick and dark and rolling. Though they leech all color from the grass, rain never falls.
Spread across that grass: crosses. They lie flat, in ever-widening circles, every direction I turn, ready for victims.
An impossible task. But I try again.
The condemned squirm. They howl. They reason. I kneel on skin, try to pin them down, but they twist away or the hammer slips or they fight me off or I slide to the grass in defeat and let them go. I’ve never gotten one to stay. … READ MORE >
— Emily Cuneo, Crosses
Father Pierre stepped forward in the pre-dawn gloaming. Those standing at attention for this sacred outdoor gathering rustled with uncertainty. The few lamps that clung to the courtyard wall gave only wavering light. Then Father stopped haltingly, as if from a barked signal.
He planted his feet in the firm soil. Looked down. Dust rippled on either side of his worn black leather shoes.
Although Father Pierre was used to preaching while standing before a pulpit, there was not one available at this outdoor venue. It was an atypical Christmas sunrise service, yet he marshaled himself for it as if it were for the homily of any high holy day: with sublimity and prayer. He looked out intently and kindly at those in attendance, panned his gaze across perhaps a dozen still faces, the owners of which now appeared settled and attentive after some brief unease. … READ MORE >
— Mark Paalman, Yuletide Homily
Only Carmen knew that Janelle sometimes hung by her knees from the bridge over Bayou St. John. Cars used it in those days, but it was mainly a pedestrian bridge. It was the same color grey as a sycamore’s trunk, and it sat low to the water, which in that part of the bayou, where it curved, was almost always still, and Janelle liked to hang from it and look down into the water, seeing first her own reflection and then, as she gazed, seeing also the reflection of the bridge in the sky and the longest limbs of the oak trees stretching from the banks and the long hydrilla fronds standing languid and serene below the water’s surface and the whole reflected world. … READ MORE >
— Daniel Fitzpatrick, The Bridge
Please, you can’t ask me his name or how I know him. The truth is, no one really knows him. He’s forgotten so many important things about himself, even he can’t tell you who he is.
He tried to tell me a story once, during a long car ride. We were together for hours. Maybe the rumblings of the wheels on the rolling back roads lulled him, loosened one of the locks on his memory and let something slip free. Maybe he didn’t even know it was happening. Maybe that’s why he didn’t try to stop it. … READ MORE >
— Susan Piper, The Forgotten Boy
David was twelve when he watched the old man beaten to death and would recall years later that the day was a pretty one. The sky was one large brush stroke of blue. The sun sat high above the eyeline and burned something fierce upon the earth while the wind was soft and cooling. It was a Saturday, and he was with friends. They were older than he was, and that’s why he liked them. They smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, stayed out late, and on this summer’s afternoon, committed murder, senseless and unprovoked. … READ MORE >
— Redd Butler, The Last Day
The last thing I remembered was lifting the light high enough for her to escape before the creek could drown me.
My twin sister and I hadn’t hung out for a while. I’d been busy with friends. Benny finally got his license, and his parents let him take their Jeep wherever he wanted. I felt bad for ditching her all the time, but Benny was two grades ahead of me and the starting fullback on the football team. Even when we had no place to be, we always had somewhere to drive. We’d tear through three feet of sloppy mud in Shakem Valley after rainstorms, see who could burn the blackest patch of rubber against Wal-Mart’s parking lot, and tinker with wires attached to the refrigerator-sized subwoofer that pulverized our eardrums. We sucked down full-flavored cigarettes while Black Sabbath (and other bands my dad disapproved of) punched sonic ripples into the Jeep’s canvas walls. … READ MORE >
— Cody Adams, Knee High by the Fourth of July
As the young woman took up her position on the cracked sidewalk, tremors spidered up her ribs and across her torso, portents before a quake. Shaky hands nearly dropped the sign she held. She placed an unsteady foot onto the space indicated by Sister Miriam’s knobby finger.
“That can be your post,” the aged religious said with a smile as cracked as the sidewalk.
A Subaru whispered past and through the intersection.
The young woman nodded, then checked herself. Why was she always agreeing to everything Sister Miriam suggested? That habit had landed her in this situation in the first place. She wondered, was that a power Sister Miriam possessed or a weakness in herself? … READ MORE >
— Brian G. Smith, Signs and Wonders
The red-painted curb shouted its rebuke, although she bravely ignored it. Sleet from earlier that night had frozen in the gutter. Her old tires crunched bitter bites of water glass, as loud as a crash. Her right hand raised the transmission lever to PARK. Her left foot depressed the parking brake. Mittened fingers fumbled with jingling keys, which surely sounded like an alarm to anyone on that deserted street. She shook, breathed deep, opened the car door.
Night’s chill web gripped and contorted her thin limbs with shivers. Just a few short paces to go, she thought, while navigating the slick sidewalk. Once across, she lowered to one knee, then two, slowly, in the crackling cold turf. … READ MORE >
— Mark Paalman, In Him We Have Redemption
It had been raining for hours, lashing against the windscreen and roof of the car, blurring the headlights into ghostly trails. The wipers thumped back and forth, marking time against the rain. The road, or what remained of it, had narrowed to a twisting ribbon, hemmed in by tangled hedgerows and the occasional ghostlike blur of a tree.
Inside the car, everyone was in a foul mood.
“I’m telling you, we should’ve turned back at the last petrol station,” the mother snapped in frustration from the passenger seat.
“And I’m telling you it was a perfectly fine road until it just … wasn’t,” the father shot back, gripping the wheel like he was trying to wring some sense out of it. “The phone’s satnav is dead. It doesn’t make sense.” … READ MORE >
— John S. Walsh, Every Piece Has a Place
NONFICTION
I was amazed there wasn’t more of a line to go down there. I mean, he’s such a popular guy. I believe there were more people going to see Santa Chiara, but perhaps that’s because her body never decayed and they show it off every twenty minutes or so. The wax they’ve put on her face, to keep the skin perfect, has turned a sort of ghastly green, so I can imagine why people want to see her more than Frank. After all, Frank decayed, and now what’s left of his bones is housed in a little stone box underneath his basilica.
I walked down his stairs and took note of everything. Though they’ve fitted the place out with electricity, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see torches lining the walls. It certainly was the kind of place I’ve imagined for every D&D adventure I’ve ever taken. The steps curled into darkness, a place hollowed out of solid rock under the basilica. Truth is, this little cave is the reason the big church was even built. Now it’s dressed like a sort of chapel. … READ MORE >
— Steve Bowman, In the Tomb of San Francesco
My daughter Shannon and I were on the Slea Head Tour in western Ireland. Having a guide drive the narrow, windy roads allowed me to take pictures and enjoy the dramatic coastline and rocky cliffs. We visited a farm to see the historic beehive huts and hold baby lambs. As we were walking the pebbly path back to the van, twin lambs and a ewe blocked our way. Right there, the baby lambs dropped to their calloused knees and began to nurse. The ewe was dirty, her fleece clotted with mud from the recent rain, but the lambs contentedly took their fill as she stood patiently on her dainty hooves. … READ MORE >
— Marcia N. Lynch, Feeling Sheepish
The tree was dying. It was a graceful willow with long, streaming branches umbrellaed over the trunk, creating a secret world under its canopy, perfect for storytelling and hide-and-seek. The tree was beloved and glorious in the spring, with delicate pink and white flowers. It had some difficult years and close calls with disease and injury, its will to live and resilience always bringing it back, but not this time. Now the upper canopy was filled with splintering, black, and brittle branches, a clear sign that the tree was dying. There was nothing to be done. … READ MORE >
— Charolette Winder, Wood Flowers
The gospel is a story of great inversions, one full of unexpected turns. God becomes man, in a move from wealth to want, beauty to brokenness, eternal embrace to utter rejection — in short, a move from heaven to earth to hell and back again.
Song lyrics can speak about this inversion, or they can portray the inversion itself, embodying its upside-down ethic. Music, as with all the arts, offers a way to refresh our view of beauty, helping us to see differently. As Paul Klee is famously credited with saying, “Art does not render what is visible, but renders visible.”1 Music, in particular, touches us at multiple levels — cognitive, emotional, visceral — to convey truth in ways that mere facts or assertions cannot. I wish to highlight here three contemporary songs that have interpreted afresh for me these great inversions of our Christian faith and creed. … READ MORE >
— Rebecca Martin, “I’ve Got the Joy” — Christian Music in an Upside-Down Kingdom
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