John McCaffrey I bought a bottle of beer and sat next to a woman I found attractive at the bar. She was alone and reading a book. I finished the beer and introduced myself. She told me her name was Meg. She was reading The Sun Also Rises and I asked her what she thought of Hemingway. Meg took a sip of her own beer and said Hemingway was good but not as good as Fitzgerald. I joked whether she meant “Ella,” and bought us both beers...

Alexander V. Bach The rules they had talked about for a while included that he be in the same room, that they both make the choice and that they would have no contact again with the man selected, which helped with the last rule–no names; he didn’t want any way for them to know each other, and he didn’t want any names said during the act. There were also stipulations they went over about the act itself, more appeasements and...

Daniel Torday He slapped her too hard on her ass and they stopped for an awkward moment. Andrew felt uncontrollably angry. Andrew had splurged on a room in the quaint medieval city of Sighisora. After he and Hilary fumbled out of their clothes and onto the paper-thin sheets of the bed in their room, she hardly responded to him. Her sense of humor, which was what had drawn him to her from the first, evaporated as soon as they touched. He...

Michelle Bailat-Jones This is the season they use fireworks to scare the starlings from the vines. The season of hot afternoons and crisp evenings, when her lower back will stiffen with chilled sweat as the sun disappears from the rows of grapes to be harvested. She lives with the men, but apart, separated by a sheet hanging across one end of the dormitory. She smells their feet and armpits in her sleep and dreams of her husband, of the...

Simone Martel Driving into Coyote, it’s a straight shot between fields of dusty tomato plants, but the gold tower she’s aiming for is still miles away and the rattling pickup won’t go any faster. “So forget your scheme. Turn the truck around, come back and do some real work.” She hears her dad jeering, sees her brothers nodding. Off the freeway at last, she circles the block twice before finding the entrance to the...

Dan Forward The fading fall made the city came into a more vivid focus. The cold breath of oncoming winter lent outlines to the environment, a sharpness indiscernible in warm months. Every brick in every façade could be counted with ease, every branch of every tree–now bereft of the motley foliage indicative of the onset of the season–stood out against a sky of indifferent gray. A flock of pigeons spilled off a rooftop, displaced by...

Kris Saknussemm There’s something very important to be said for investigating problems as completely as possible before you reach any conclusions. I was reminded of this the other day when an old friend e-mailed in from his latest post in Latvia. Clive was born to be a hotelier—actually born in a hotel, trained in London and Switzerland…and then dispatched by his multinational employer to manage a prestigious establishment in...

Ryan Millbern Taylor sat in the corner of the bar at the Holiday Inn in Galvin, talking to a man who called himself Sydney. Her pockmarked legs were crossed, her top foot bouncing to the beat of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” A strobe light pulsed in one corner and shot up into a rotating disco ball that covered the empty dance floor with tiny shards of fragmented light. Sydney was getting drunk fast, gulping doubles of bourbon and...

Jessica Johnson We left a day before my 17th birthday, just when the sun began pumping hazy orange light into a humid Friday morning. Mom was rushing from one room to another, making sure we didn’t forget any small toys or dishcloths, while Dad and I stuffed our sleeping bags into the U-Haul and Keith hunted for our cat. An hour later I sat behind the passenger seat, knees curled over a laptop case and one foot jacked high on a plastic...

Nora Bonner Sandy Harris died on her way to dress rehearsal two days before the opera premiere. Most of the ensemble didn’t notice her absence. She was nine years old. The other children in the chorus whispered her name while mothers fitted their wig-caps and buttoned their long red robes. Her costume remained on the rack, stiff and heavy over satin slippers. Before long, the stagehand appeared, miscounted, and led them to the...