The Other Osama

Fiction
  He was born with a silver knife in his mouth. And he was its first victim. —Osama Alomar   Inside, the shop was limewashed and long enough to fit…

The Bar at the End of the World

Fiction
  The local news, projected to the bar by way of their staticky, cafeteria tray–sized TV, warned of severe storm conditions, possible flash flooding. That afternoon, the odd car that…

Driftwood

Fiction
  A few days after I moved into the abandoned fisherman’s shack by the NIPSCO plant, my new neighbor Hymie gave me a hunting rifle and a box of ammo.…

Good New Teeth

Fiction
  The old man woke up screaming. The nurse, asleep in the next room and dreaming of the seaside, heard the scream as a black harpy screeching toward a flock…

The Storming of Forestswarm

Fiction
  He called it the new house, but it was very old. The landlord wouldn’t say exactly. He’d said it was built in 1920 or 1900 or, once, “the late…

Eulogy for Bao Bayun

Fiction
  Today we mourn our great leader. A loss of great consequence: how hungry our stomachs, how boring our stories, how cold our campfires will be. No one knows when…

One Fight after Another

Fiction
  Dolores, nearing the end of her second ambulance shift of the week, sits in a plastic lawn chair outside the back of the fire station. Between calls she often…

Powder

Fiction
  By the summer of 1993, my father had had enough of the war and decided it was time for a vacation. “We’ve been locked up for two years now,…

The baby was perfect and

Fiction
  the labor nurse said, He’s got hair! while Todd looked between his fingers from across the room and I wiped the fluid glistening off Nicholas’s pink forehead, touched his…

In a Burning Volcano

Fiction
  This is a work of fiction.   Raymond and I walked through the prison yard—from the back classroom, along the chain-link fence bordering dirt sports fields, down the long…

On Island

Fiction
  According to all the usual rules, the goat wasn’t allowed on the mail boat. But the captain would make an exception just this once for the new lighthouse keeper.…