I’d been talking with Joshua for about an hour at the No Life Bar on Prospect Street when I noticed it: the knife sticking out of the back of his neck, just a few inches to the left of his spinal column.
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A month before your face disappeared, we were at the dinner table, silent as usual. Forking at the rice aimlessly, I blurted out to you “I signed a lease on a new apartment.” Without saying a word, you got up from the
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Nobody knew how Miguel got sick. That morning he had been running wild through the streets with the other neighborhood boys, playing baseball and seeing who could run to the corner bodega the fastest. The July sun had branded a bold flush
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“The Herald?” Two bored, brown eyes looked through the thin metal slot behind the heavy door. Ostensibly, the entrance looked more like a bomb shelter than a simple shop, and certainly not the kind you’d see in a small town. It was the kind
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Helga suspected but couldn’t know for sure. Signs abounded, however. Newspaper gone to black and white snowflakes. Scraps disappearing from countertops. Prescriptions with her suddenly omitted address and phone number. As though—no. Every Covergirl was losing her head, but through tender serration,
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Slate clouds roiled overhead as Ray walked down a narrow street. He passed an old man wearing a fedora and crumpled gray suit who was standing in the angled storefront of a small shop. A few antiques were displayed in the windows.
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The first night I saw him, the moon hung in the stars like a massive eye, and the wind crooned at my window like the voice of a lost lover. I woke with a rumbling stomach and stumbled through the curtain separating
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Sergio the Bailador by Brenda Gutierrez Chicken by Christopher Labaza Final Emancipation by Stephen M. Pierce Those Who Love Us by Bruce McAllister The Hollow Face by Paul Stansbury
When I was young, my hair was very orange—the color of the brightest fruit and of the four-winged tropical bird known as The Golden Orb—and I had (and still do) the sensitivities of people with that color of hair, ones doctors still
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This is a true story. As true as stories can be. Sergio was the neighborhood dancer. He’d show up to all the kickbacks, functions, and celebrations with a twelve-pack of Bud Light sitting on top of his left shoulder, ready to get
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