Golden Years
by Laura Winnick
Phoebe and I meet up at a bar that’s too crowded for us to go fully inside, let alone talk to one another. We lock eyes and exit. It keeps happening that I don’t want to be where most people want to be.
We idle outside, November’s temperature dropping, Phoebe propping her compact dancer’s body on the frame of her bike, and me, stamping around, trying to feel something.
Julia’s Detroit
by Nicholas Rombes
Somehow, it was Julia’s Detroit. It seemed it always had been.
I’d been sent to Detroit to save someone, although in the end it was me who needed saving.
Maybe it was because I only understood the city through the filter of her stories and the byways of their telling. It was her eyes, after all, that showed me what to look at, what to ignore.
I Was There, Too
by Alex DiFrancesco
Broom into the corners, mop into the corners. Over and over, my job. I’ve made some bad decisions, I know. I guess not as bad as the guys who end up in the hole.
Matthew Miner. I first saw him when I went to clean out his cell. I’d heard about him, yeah. That guy. The one who had killed all those people. Put here, in the hole, for his own protection. From the guys like he’d been, outside, before the killings, and from the guys he’d hated outside. Nobody wanted a guy like him around.
Disappear Me
by Steve Himmer
In hindsight we saw the invisible coming. A meme in which photos of teenagers caught in conversation with adults bore the words “Disappear Me” became ubiquitous enough that even I noticed. Then it spread to include photos of anything that looked unhappy listening to anything else, whether a cat or a dog or a small tree overshadowed by a large one. Videos of kids pulling hoods and shirt collars over their faces while talked at by parents and teachers and scolding strangers earned millions of views, and at school assemblies whole student bodies were swallowed by their clothing before baffled speakers trying to teach them how to fend off a mass shooter. Whatever the unwelcome subject, kids disappeared.
The Collington Archive
by Christopher Wood
“Guys,” she said.
Molly was an accelerated undergrad, the lone freshman in our two-semester editing class, which helped produce Concourses, the university’s recently-launched national lit mag. In sizing up our English department’s rising status, during her college search, this go-getter, or her high school advisor, had been prescient.
She cornered us in the library’s computer room, while Sam printed his EN: 397 Comparative Renaissances paper on Milton and Hughes.
“Hey, Molly,” we said.
Sam’s professor was locking up her office for the weekend in less than an hour. My buddy had to drop off his assignment pronto.
“The Collington archive just went up,” Molly announced.
The Resurrector
by Allen M. Price
Whatever you did for one of the least of my brothers, you did for me.
Matthew 25:40
May 31, 2002. The air was light. The sun bright but setting. The pallid quarter moon peeking over the horizon. And Shawn and I were going out on what would be our first date in almost seven months. We hadn’t spoken since the second Sunday in October when we both agreed that it was all too much: going to grad school, interning and dating. It wasn’t an easy decision, for me anyway. I really wanted to be with him. But time just refused to let us be together. Deep inside, though, something told me that it wasn’t over. So after letting the months go by like a bird flying south for the winter, I decided to call and congratulate him on graduating from the Kennedy school. Well, when he picked up the phone and said hello, I just about hung up, worried that he might not want to talk to me. But after I said hey, Shawn, he enunciated my name with so much excitement there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he wanted to talk to me. Only to be confirmed minutes later when he asked if I’d go to an end-of-the-school-year party with him that evening.
The Rock-afire Explosion at Pat’s Pizzazz Parlor
by Alicia Bones
A couple months back, a local guy bought a Rock-afire Explosion animatronic animal band for his amusement center, a strip mall birthday place frequented by kids whose parents couldn’t afford Chuck E. Cheese. Even with the new old electronics, Pat’s Pizzazz Parlor was the kind of place that had been over for decades; its appeal was that it wasn’t real anymore. That was OK for some kids, skating around on brown leather roller skates with neon orange wheels, playing the Addams Family Pinball and the Mrs. Pac-Man. Some kids didn’t have any other choice. It was a Pat’s party or no party.
Waiting For The Angels
by Luke Kokoszka
When Brother ascended Mama stopped being the Mama we knew her to be. I seen it first. We rode our bikes down the street from our house when his bum slowly lifted off the seat. The bike kept cruising without him on it before it spun out and crashed into the sidewalk. I stopped too. I’d never seen nothing of those likes. When Mama took us to church every Sunday the boring man would yell about Jesus and sometimes tell us how he resurrected. So that’s what I told Mama when I got home. I says to her I says, Mama, Brother done a resurrection. Shut your stupid noodle, she says. So I did, right. Ain’t nothing else to say.