Being Fred My Dad’s first CIA field assignment was in Athens, Greece. It was the late 1960s when my uncle Tom came to visit our family. He didn’t know his older brother was a spy then, though he suspected it. “One day your father and I were about to enter a store,” he told […]
Nonfiction
Being Fred
Villain
by Holly Laurent
This essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.I want to kick the shit out of Facebook and Fox News. It’s an instinct I get from my dad. Whenever I got hurt as a kid, he’d launch into a physical comedy routine, beating the hell out of whatever hurt me. If I fell out of a […]
Your One Phone Call
by Lori Jakiela
I am eating Greek salad at Panera when my phone rings. I don’t usually pick up, but it’s been a week since my biopsy and I’m still sore and my right boob is bruised black and yellow and I’ve been waiting days that have stretched on like 600 miles of bad road. My boob looks […]
Twelve Steps Ahead
by Evan Lavender-Smith
“Twelve Steps Ahead” was nominated for The Best of the Net. This is one of two instances in your life when you will receive these instructions. There is only one step you’re allowed to hear this time—the last one. It will be the first thing you hear when you’re born and it will be one of […]
The Po’ele Box
by Kirby Wright
I SWEATED IT OUT on the floral-print couch between Troy and our mother. We were waiting for my old man to get home. My brother gnashed his gum. Jenny was visiting her friend Heidi Bathen and I was glad she was gone. I saw our reflection in the living room mirror—we had looks of impending […]
Bike to the Future
by Krista Foss
Image courtesy Kelly Sikkema The scrap yard at the north end of my long city street hummed like a dystopic anthill, the day I drove up in my 15-year-old compact car, parked in front of a heap of flattened wrecks winking in an oily sun, got out, and made my way to a busy […]
Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda
by Gerry Canavan
Academics who study science fiction have typically been fixated on what they see as its privileged relationship with futurity. By imagining a possible shape for the future that will someday arise out of the present—however prescient, realistic, or patently ridiculous a particular author’s imagination of that future might be—science fiction narratives help restore to us […]
The Miracle of Ordinary
by Janette Schafer
The only things that remain of his past as a drug dealer are the physical indicators: pocked track marks in the creases of his arms, outlines of faded tattoos from decades ago, scars from the knife attacks of heroin-starved junkies or pushers trying to thrust themselves into his territory. He is a quiet older man […]
Good and Decent People
by Jerome Richard
We were standing on the parade grounds in Nuremberg where Hitler once addressed throngs of enthralled Germans. It was the scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s awe-inspiring propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Our guide for that morning told us that she was born in 1968 and that when she was old enough to learn about what happened […]
The Nightmare Next Door
by Tom Larsen
My mother is standing on a bench in the spare bedroom. I can see by the certainty of her movements that she’s done this before. “Look,” she points. “They turned the refrigerators around. Sanders must have told them I complained.” Through the window I can see two rusting refrigerators standing flush against the back of […]
