Desire Lines by Nathan Pensky Most men in Brandsville look uncomfortable coming into a hair salon. You can tell by how they sit or how they won’t meet your eyes. There are two salons in town and only one barbershop. The old barber is about 80 years old and really starting to lose his stuff. No one blames him. He’s been at it for about sixty years.
Sunday Stories: “Three Women”
Three Women by Ian MacAllen The first time Tony rapes a woman, the violation is statutory. He is eighteen, she only fifteen, but both are otherwise consenting. They have sex in the back of his mother’s Ford Pinto while parked behind the elementary school they had both attended. A week later, he leaves for college and she starts going steady with the junior varsity quarterback. Neither thinks much about it again, although the woman briefly recalls the incident during a […]
Sunday Stories: “The Cutter”
The Cutter by Francis Sanzaro I waited for Rosa at the airport doing those things you do—urinate too much, imagine other people’s lives, fall in love with a girl in yoga pants, fail to connect to the wifi, talk to a taxi driver with a mustache.
Sunday Stories: “Early Men Make Fire”
Early Men Make Fire by Theadora Walsh 1. Your leaving started in the café. I was watching you play the saxophone. You were almost not there, mostly brass, the space around the brass. That’s the music, the blowing, but blowing alone is not enough. It’s also what you look like while you play, that’s what you said, how you think about the shade of blue just before the sky goes black. Not the blue from “all blue skies from here,” […]
Sunday Stories: “ALL CAPS”
ALL CAPS by Gabriel Blackwell The reasons the woman had threatened the parents of the murdered child were now, she admitted, more or less completely incomprehensible to her. These were not her exact words. I don’t know what I was thinking, your Honor, when I told him . . . She was wearing a blazer and diamond earrings, but the newspapers covering the trial, having already discovered the woman’s social media accounts, chose to run a photo in which she […]
Sunday Stories: “Sex Robots”
Sex Robots by Lucie Britsch My family like to eat but my father thinks that sounds like we’re all obese so he says we’re foodies because he read it somewhere and thinks it sounds like it might be a rock band from the 70’s.
Sunday Stories: “Maus Tales”
Maus Tales by Terry Barr When I was nine, I took religious confirmation classes in the same Methodist church my mother’s family had belonged to for decades. My ten classmates and I took our instruction every Wednesday afternoon in the junior room, located in the far reaches of the church basement. Dr. Winefortner, our minister, prodded us gently about matters essential to our souls, or at the very least our moral health, and at the culmination of our six-week sessions, […]
Sunday Stories: “Cheers for Drowning Girls”
Cheers for Drowning Girls by Marta Balcewicz Lisa’s never seen anyone throw their clothes off so quickly. Walter tosses his esoteric-skater-logo t-shirt and green socks on top of his towel. He darts across the beach without looking back and lunges into the lake with a loud splash. A few seconds pass and he reappears, takes a breath, and goes back underwater.