Fiction
What Is A Lake Beyond An Extinct Word?
by Corey Farrenkopf in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
Many summers ago, there was a lake in Mattie’s backyard. Now a bowl of cracked earth dips from the parched rim. The blank expanse presses on for miles, summer homes abandoned along the shore.
The hulk of an old data processing plant looms above all.
Mattie barely remembers when she used to fish with her grandfather. She was so young, hooking bass and pike, catfish schooling in black clouds beneath their dock.
Once, they sold their catch to visitors. Now only scaleless skeletons bleach white on exposed silt.
Mattie and her grandfather search for once drowned treasures. Sunken sailboats. Old ou...
We Whose Fathers Have Transformed into Wild Animals of the Land, Sea, and Sky
by Spencer Nitkey in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
Ten-Point Buck
Kaye dreams of killing his father. When I am not terrified of this dream, I am so jealous that I wish I could steal it through his lips. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever saw my father again. Kaye’s certainty calms me, violent as it is. Now, as Kaye stares down the sight of his rifle and the tremendous buck we’ve been tracking for three days comes up from the brush, he is closer than ever to achieving it. In the Sierra Nevada, mosquito-bitten and muddy, I am not jealous. My tongue tastes of pennies, and more than anything, I am sorry. I want to take Kaye in my hands, run his c...
Strawberry Island
by Emily O'Malley Liu in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
We were boys when we met by the seashore. He threw a stick at me and called me ugly. I tackled him into the sand. We became inseparable.
His name was Angelo. For fourteen days, Angelo and I met as if by preordination at dawn, on the beach behind my family’s vacation rental on the southern Maine coast. The tide in the bay went out, out, out, and so did we, scouting across the massive expanse of wet, freshly revealed earth, hunting in the tide pools that formed between the rocks, seeking out belligerent crabs and docile sea stars, collecting stones and shells and sea glass. Decades ago, a hotel...
Mother’s Bane
by Madi Haab in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
Edwin was an enthusiastic lover, eager to please and to pleasure. He kissed Briar all over, even the strange red bumps she’d first noticed on her skin that morning. His mouth was slow, then teasing, and he brought her to her peak—once, twice—as they made love.
After, they fell back on the mattress in a sweaty, sticky-sweet tangle. “You taste like honeysuckle,” he whispered in her ear before dozing off.
Those would be her husband’s last words.
Briar roused in the morning to find Edwin staring past her head, pupils blown wide yet unseeing. Unmoving. Unbreathing. She clasped his clammy shoulder ...
Horseland
by EC Dorgan in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
They’re monsters, the combines and threshers inching along the highway—I’m almost to Saskatoon when they surround me. I drop my speed from 110 to 15 km/hr, and my GPS recalibrates to say I’m an hour and fifteen minutes from downtown.
I look for the end of the vehicles but there’s only smoke and metal. My pulse picks up. Remember to breathe. I make this mistake every year, driving into the city when the ag-show is ending. I want to smash my head against the glass, but that won’t get me to my hotel faster.
I check in ninety minutes later. My phone buzzes, and it’s my partner, wanting to know if...
We are the Giants We Fear
by Lee Zanello in Issue Twenty-Two, February 2026
This is a trick our uncle teaches us before he leaves. When the rumbling from the mountains makes our homes shake and we are scared or anxious, he calms us by forcing us to focus on our immediate environment. “Look for colours,” he says. “Something red, something brown, something yellow. Listen, really listen, to the space around you. This is your home and you are safe here.”
Our uncle teaches us many things as kids, my sister and me. We learn how to make a fire, which plants are edible and which can heal a wound. He takes us just past the edge of the woods outside of town, farther from home ...