short story
Self-cleaning Oven
After the third failed pregnancy, Harriet’s sisters started to call her the self-cleaning oven. Henry already had one kid with Doris, the bitch who kept calling them in the middle of the night to complain about the water temperature in Henry’s old house. She still expected him to maintain the property even after receiving full custody of their mewling little boy Jamie. Henry began sleeping through the phone calls, and so it was Harriet who had to answer the phone.
Into the Darkened Green World
The beautiful silver-haired ex-movie actress had stood at the car window with her rescued doe and black bear, while Blair talked to her husband about the Night Slayer and the latest cattle thefts and mutilations...
Lucas Boone Gets Treatment
Repeating the trauma of Afghanistan is supposed to cure it. I don the state-of-the-art headset, 3 fucking D, and hold the controller. Hepatic feedback. Sit in the seat. Hepatic feedback. Humvee on a bumpy road? Not really. No way to simulate the choke of sand and smoke, but when she thinks you’re ready, the doctor adds smells—diesel, sweat, gunpowder, blood.
The Wolf Is Living
My father liked to say that the only thing to do in Florence, South Carolina, is eat dinner at Cain’s BBQ, and I am beginning to think he’s goddamned right. Of course, many thousand more restaurants exist here now, most of them slick chains, but the notion that my father, the Colonel, once had still holds water and holds it pretty well.
The Volunteer
Andrea Cole didn’t simply return to school pregnant. Nope, in her adult and responsible, super Andrea-Cole way, she’d taken small steps throughout the summer to prepare all of us for it. She’d met with the principal and all of her teachers, file folder with the color-coded tabs of her medical records and relevant state laws ahead of her like a shield.
Relics of the Woman Who Vanished
We want deeper insights into this woman who left us; we want her secrets; we want to know how she managed to do what she did—how she just one day vanished.
Smiley and B. 4-Ever
Damn community-meeting suckin up smoke-time. My B-time. It all just a waste of time. Staff don’t know nothin, nohow. Look at Mr. Eric up there tellin us about scams. Watch out for the Magazine People. They out there, tryin to get you.
John Henry Fleming
John Henry Fleming reads a story with marginal notes at our inaugural event.
The Baptism
Pastor danced through the crowd, knocking people down with a single touch of Holy Ghost power. Prayer Warriors ran behind him, spreading blankets over the bottom halves of women so they’d be decent in their long-skirts and dresses.