By Isaiah Sasser When the last goldfinch of the fall left the bird feeder, it took my father’s soul with it, hopefully to somewhere with better weather. The neighbors say my father never had a soul, but they never really knew him. It takes a lot of soul to be as bitter as he was. Last fall, I asked him to read me poetry with … Continue reading Migratory Birds
By Brennan Berryhill The gold was dizzying. It spun in his eyes like spirals, sparkling in the mirror caging them in from above. Unreality made real. He looked up and saw himself like he was down. People pressed him from all sides, brushed him with briefcases, crossed him with sleeve cuffs. 20 became 19 became 18. Ding. Faces drifted off the elevator, removing the haunt … Continue reading Bottom Floor
By Andrew Winter She came to me in my tall tower locked,She knocked, and said, “I am that beautyWhich your maker fitted for your life and nockedWithin the string of your good sense. Open,For long have we two lived in good concourseAnd I would not a stranger be nor leaveYour love-couch fully cold, nor sourceThe goldest good of yours in other thanMyself, appointed for your … Continue reading The Turret of Accustom
By Andrew Winter As yet we below had heard nothing of the Endtimes, though I remembered perfectly what I had read about it in life. For hell sharpens all things, not least the memory of grief. So we heard Time had begun to limp down the last ridge into its grave, and some said its fate was worse than ours, but we could only imagine, … Continue reading The Tomb Robber
By Aryn Joy Tomasetti They call me Henry, it’s been two years, and I’m still ten. Kids don’t think about time the way adults do. We don’t count it quickly and we’re not visited by the ghosts from our childhood. We are the ghosts from our childhood; we just haven’t made it to the future yet. All the same, I thought I knew what Dad … Continue reading Out of Play
By Andrew Winter The cold had by now numbed and confused my mind, and I could not deny it. I tried to think only of the food for my love. I had it, packages and packages of it, pound upon pound, piled on the sled. In the near-pitch darkness I was now almost a quarter of the way across the great Blackwisp Lake, eight inches … Continue reading Silence of Water
By Isaiah Sasser Weathers followed the faint trail through the undergrowth. A broad bear print impressed softly upon the loam caught his eye; a left paw, pointing north. Four claw marks scored the earth. The claw second from the left was missing. Weathers nodded to himself. His breath quickened and his pace increased. The lever-action rifle strapped around his shoulder jostled with the forceful, deliberate … Continue reading The Crows Will Pick Clean Our Bones
By Aidan Jones Black clouds gathered over Wawel Hill, twisting like the dragon that, according to popular legend, had once called the hill home. All throughout Krakow, citizens cast worried glances toward the sky, bidding quick goodbyes to their friends as they hurried homeward. Certain there would be no more business that day, the shopkeepers in the Cloth Hall shuttered their booths. Even the old … Continue reading Storm Over Krakow
By Andrew Winter Mallery flung the map onto the dashboard, tearing it just at the point where a little dot said San Diego. “Why not just drive off the cliff right here and be done with it?” she said. Nub kept his eyes fixed forward, though he was not as calm as he seemed. “How many fights did we have growing up, and now that … Continue reading Creative Writing Awards: “One-Point-Two Inches from Eighty Feet”
By Elizabeth Hoppel “I am tired—that’s the trouble, yes…just tired,” she thought, sighing deeply as she washed the dirt from beneath her fingernails in a large ceramic sink, filled to the quarter mark with soapy water. In the window’s reflection she saw wrinkles drooping down her face, every line etched like a tally mark, won in thankless labor. She began counting her wrinkles with her … Continue reading Creative Writing Awards: “No Time for Sparrows”
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