I had lived the longest at the village house and could remember the time of arriving at consensus in our opposition to individualism of any kind. Favoritism was out. Babying, out. We didn’t ask about each other’s pasts. But there were, somehow, things we all knew about Rosie. A short story by Jacqueline Feldman.

The loony and the bright spark. It could be the title of a fairy tale, a bit like beauty and the beast, a sad story with quite a happy ending. The full title would be the roadside loony and the bright…

“The story of your cousin? Democracy’s Martyr? The victim of the Sultry Sect? Would you like me to tell you the story, Don Fernando? I assure you, it’s very short, and it’s become even shorter over ti…

Take your time he tells himself, however he can’t take a thing. He’s convinced he, hexxed, lost it in the famously tall grass or he gave it away to someone by accident in a wad of things. Still, he’s …

You don’t know if you were born wrong or if it’s because on the way home from the hospital there was a big storm and your daddy wrecked the car and your mama dropped you in the floorboard. Y’all all s…

‘You know there were times when I dreamed of being with Bill Burroughs in the Empress Hotel – which no longer exists by the way – in Earl’s Court just off the Old Brompton Road. We were talking about pirates, drugs & his idea of the Johnson. via Poc…

We stood and we moved and we stopped at a point. You stood and you moved. I stopped at a point. I mention this to you meaning what? I received your postcard from Northern Ireland. Your dispatch from Indianapolis. The book you sent me (Wittgensteins Neffe) from Austria. The parcel delivered from Prague. Stop. I’m about my pages again. It’s been years since I’ve been about my pages again. Fiction by David McLendon.

I wandered over to inspect his merchandise. The coffins were made from a reddish wood. They looked slightly scratched. On a small table there was a laminated menu, like the menus you get in a Chinese restaurant, but with pictures of coffins. By Alistair McCartney.

I have looked back. Where I passed under the railway bridge outside the station the two orange signal lamps signal back. And the soft indistinct light is on the mound of grasses the signal mounts from; there is no clear sight of the track. I have passed and seen a blackbird, singing from the signal posts, with the coloured sky at his back. By Julia Calver.

I pushed the photo into my back pocket and stole a glimpse at my reflection in the slip of mirror on the booth. There are mirrors everywhere in this city. I couldn’t escape the multiple versions of me following my halting progress down unfamiliar streets. By Sian Norris.

Ms. Stevens had requested that nobody be notified after she checked out. Her room was full of cellophane. It was possibly from things she got at the gift shop, like the Russian dolls and the miniature car set, but that didn't account for the rest of it. Slithers of the stuff kept attaching themselves to me, and whenever I took one piece off, another immediately replaced it, as if they were asexual organisms hellbent on reproducing no matter what the outcome or the point. By Cassandra Moss.

She imagined the missed connections section of Craigslist tomorrow being dominated by request after request for, “Crying girl on Connecticut ave, Sunday, 45 degrees. Why were you crying? I am so sorry to see you feel this way. Don’t worry, everybody cries. I could still tell that you are attractive.” People would see her as an example and they would be inspired to cry whenever they felt like it. She would become a martyr for the cause of unrestrained emotion. There would be stories about her. By Megan Boyle.

Mornings with the light at its best and evenings when it would do, she rolled back and forth on the horizon. The swivel of the telescope her husband left for her entertainment creaked in its housing and stuck when it turned. From its southwestern extreme the brass shaft took a nudge, a firm bump of her palm, to set the device back into motion northwest. She never strayed from that range, never turned the lens skyward to take in the stars or look back toward Europe or closer at hand across the blank slate of Greenland, that near-continent whose raw edge she occupied in her waiting. Excerpt f...