Bruce Bromley She thought that she wanted him to stay in the same place, but she did not know where that place was. She wanted to be able to return to him, to come back with bags of vegetables, coffee, and cheese, to open their apartment door and smell the rosemary soap he showered with on weekday evenings before Noah was born. She would track him through the kitchen, down the hall, into the living room where he would be standing before the...

John Hemingway I was reading a novel about every three or four days in the beginning and if I had any time between lessons I’d spend it at the Feltrinelli near the Scala. They had a good selection of American and English titles and as I bounced from stories as different as Endo’s The Sea and Poison to Coezee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I found that my tastes in literature were divided into two camps: the authors whose pessimistic...

Renee Evans At the breakfast table, Grace sits eating instant oatmeal she warmed in the microwave all by herself. The fake peach scent makes her stomach turn a little, but this is the only thing she knows how to fix and her mother—Diane—isn’t around to prepare anything for her, again. Her father, Frank, is in the shower, weeping and telling himself he needs to stop. He’s got to get to work, got to earn money to pay for things...

Julie Innis Because the dog sleeps all day, she’s awake all night, whining at both sides of their bed, high and plaintive, punctuated by the rolling of her ball and the clicking of her nails on the wooden floor. Sometimes the ball rolls under the radiator or the bureau or the bookcase they found outside their apartment building on trash day. Then the whining is louder, more pointed, until either the man or the woman breaks, still...

Dylan James Brock Part 2 22 June 2002, 3pm Hot sunshine awakens me. On the pop art print across from where I lie, Lichtenstein’s little dots diffuse into solid color, only to sharpen when I focus. I rise from bed, light a cigarette, and play some music. From my bedside coffee pot, I pour leftover, lukewarm java into a dirty mug, and down it in three gulps. After the first chorus of the Mp3 playing, I turn it up and sing along: So you...

Jonathan D. Scott It took me a few seconds before I understood that the girl was talking to me. She stood on the step above where I was sitting, bent slightly, casting a shadow over my textbook. “Joe!” I looked up. She was a white girl. Her light brown hair was pulled back behind her ears with clips. She had large blue eyes and wonderfully smooth cheekbones. “Joe?” I have never been called Joe. I should have told her that then. I...

Dylan James Brock Part 1 22 June 2002, twelve am Chloe and I sit facing each other on the stone railing of her front porch. It must be midnight – the stoplight above the intersection of Grant and Cherokee just started blinking red. I sip from a cup of coffee that is somehow cold in air that could steam broccoli, but the java still tastes great because Chloe made it. She’s got a radio show from three to six am on the student station...

Caitlin Horrocks Sissy had worked weekends at Corint’s Steakhouse since she was 15 and not allowed to carry open drinks to the tables. Another server or bartender had to do it for her and they grumbled, but not too loudly, because she was the boss’s daughter, and Zachary Corint was one of the few bosses left in Tatter Lake. People complained about that too, said that Corint had driven local businesses under, made bad deals and broken...

Claire Rudy Foster Liz was a chain-smoker. She sat on the roof at night, lighting cigarette after cigarette, one off of another. She rarely got caught because she kept all the stubs in one of Pop’s empty beer cans. The section of the roof where she sat was right next to the dumpster, she would drop the can over the edge of the gutter and listen to make sure it landed in with the rest of the trash. It made a good noise, a hearty thunk that...

Ryan McCarl Every day for ten years Robert had come to this café on the second floor of the Borders on North Michigan Avenue. He was a talented day-trader, fluent in the language of the market. He saw candlesticks and skylines in graphs where those with less training saw only the patternless movement of a line; in cloud-clusters of data points he saw writing as clear as Times New Roman type, with outliers dotting and flourishing the...