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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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.