Robin Lippincott is the author of three novels, In the Meantime (Toby Press, 2007), Our Arcadia: An American Watercolor (Viking, 2001, Penguin 2002) and Mr. Dalloway (Sarabande Books, 1999, now in its fourth printing), and a collection of short stories, The Real, True Angel (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 1996, 1999). His fiction has received nominations for the [...]
Yearly Archives: 2007
Moles by Julia Gordon-Bramer
That yard was out to get me: to make me pay for his neglect. I’d cared too much about the inside and, jealous, possessive, he’d lost his muddy mind. I’d been keeping my eyes up, you know; worrying too much over the above-ground happenings: erratic employment, broken family, troubled friends and their alcohol-fueled urges to [...]
Dead City Sky by Craig Hase
This was in college, a week before she went back to her boyfriend, and I wandered at night, looking for just one star in the dead city sky. We were wrapped in an army blanket. She said, “You’re just another bourgeois deadweight.”
Unnecessary Impressions by Bob Thurber
To make a mask that fit like a second skin, they required a mold of my father’s ruined face. I sat in a green vinyl chair and watched them work while he breathed through a rubber tube. This was after midnight in an office above a bowling alley. The woman spooned thick white gook from [...]
Well-Coiffed Mullet by Tom Mahony
The stoplight felt endless. I flipped through the radio dial—sick of the same old stuff—and paused at a soft hits station. It blared some power ballad from the 80’s. Not my music. I reached for the dial but hesitated, vaguely captivated by the hypnotic mélange of synthesizer, melodramatic falsetto, mechanical drumbeat.
Conversation Pique by Janice Arenofsky
Some women lose their cool when they miss a 50 percent-off sale at Sak’s. Others have a hissy fit on a bad hair day. Me, I get pissed (or piqued for those delicate souls) whenever I can’t hear the rest of an interesting conversation. I don’t mean conversations like when you call your best friend [...]
The Second Coming by Carol Culver Rzadkiewicz
Dr. Louise Fuller exits her house on Bristol Way promptly at three, the bells of St. Michael’s tolling the hour as she makes a right at the corner and strides down the sidewalk. It will take her exactly fifteen and one-half minutes to walk to Stanley Hall, wherein are located the offices and classrooms of [...]
Non Sequiter Love by Ryan Sparks
Words falling, dropping against the floor in Cuban jazz rhythms. “What’s hid-ing in the ten-e-ment hawwwls?” she sing-songs, her fingernails trailing against the old hallway that’s wearing thirteen coats of off-white paint. She looks over at me for acknowledgment of her creation, and I smile and force an audible amount of breath out of my [...]
I Went Back to Ohio by Ryan Sparks
That old time excitement and pomp that used to pervade the American College Experience has long since passed us by; anyone older than fifty can tell you that. The exuberant sense of school pride and fervor for tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise disappeared with the expansion of the middle-class, and even [...]
Work by Julie Marie Wade
Passing Why is it important that the day Michael Landon died I was standing half-naked in Lee Bennett’s bathroom examining my newly budding breasts? A constellation fixed in memory: how my grandmother had bought me a pink-and-black bikini the day before on the first chilly morning of the Northwest summer, and I had tried it [...]