Susan Levi Wallach I was nine years old when I killed the boy, pushing the knife between the soft bones of his chest with both my hands. I pulled it out slowly, not realizing at first the finality of what I’d done. “What’s your name, boy?” I whispered. He had been playing in the woods behind the motel, just beyond the barbecue grills and picnic benches, out of sight from the pool where both our mothers lay sunbathing with their...

Richard Cassone Lili leaned against the window and listened to the noise on the playground. The children below were organizing themselves into rows along neat lines painted on the blacktop, waiting to go to school. Since she’d entered the fifth grade, she always got to come in first and wait in the classroom. The older children had class on the top floor of the brick schoolhouse, and the teachers had enough on their hands in the...

Anthony Cuthbertson Looking back to that summer, the memories develop in my mind like a photograph in black and white. A simple unblemished nostalgia evoked in a grainy image of smiling faces on a summer day. The grey tone camouflaging the dirt and hiding the smell, a moment captured unspoiled by babble and clatter, romanticized and disguised in a fading snapshot. ───────── As I remember it, the old house had been empty...

M. David Hornbuckle It began with a growing sensation in the lacrimal sac. The boy’s name was Daniel Ledbetter. His peers called him Bed Wetter—not due to any actual or even perceived incontinence on his part, simply because of the sound of the words. Nonetheless, the teasing of the children caused him heaviness of heart, as well as stomachaches, migraines, a recurring and violent revenge fantasy, and a muttering tic. After some...

Bill Hillmann It began at the carnival. Those magic nights, the whole of St. Greg’s parish there, all strolling over from the bungalows and two flats and apartments all mix matched throughout the neighborhood. There were the games, the shouts of the carnies, the swirling thunder of the Tilt-A-Whirl, lights flashing, pulsing, the colors of yellow and red and green and blue exploding like fireworks against the walls of the church, the old...

Harvey Havel Against the glow of a calm fire the young boy and his father ate their cooked lamb quietly within the dark confines of their hovel high on the Meccan hillside. They had just finished their evening prayers and were both famished from a day of trading trinkets in the city bazaar for whatever they could get for them. Every so often a cold wind swept through the home and fanned the fire they enjoyed, its warm light dancing and...

Angela Natividad As always, he saw her before she saw him: a wisp of a creature, sitting by a window with a hand-rolled cigarette, now mostly ash, smoldering between the fingers on her right hand. She was writing in a Moleskine with her left. He slowed his pace and fell across her like a ghost, lifting the cigarette from between her fingers and setting it to rest in a nearby ashtray. She looked up and smiled — slowly, returning from a...

Ikhide R. Ikheloa We sit around this fireplace in the sky that never goes out. We are staring at each other and these words are like the firewood that stokes the fire-of-many-faces. We sit around this fireplace but we are cold. Here take my firewood it burns bright it burns long it burns hard. Take my firewood and we will be warm. In my dream I fled America, the land of large people that know no hunger, sad people that will never know the...

Richard Cassone The rain fell. It fell in sheets. It fell in drops as penetrating as buckshot. It slowed and still fell: a light, widely woven blanket of needles, piercing, stinging. It was day, but dark like dusk. The old man watched. Explosions of water rattled his windshield. He saw from inside the bursts, through the glass. They wanted to touch him. Some crept in through the cracked rubber seams of the door. They pooled...

Marcos Soriano On the third Wednesday in June, after a lunch he’d hardly managed to eat, Donald Mathison reported to the fifth floor of the 400 Parnassus Avenue Medical Building.  The weather had been unusually warm for the past several days, but inside the Oncology ward the air held an artificial chill, and gooseflesh rose on Donald’s arms as he crossed the threshold. He had a 3:30 p.m. appointment with the head of the department, and...