By L.M. Moore
My memory’s not what it should be. Not for someone my age. Sometimes I forget where I parked my truck.
Properly Dark
read more
Prose
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
Slingin’ Pearl
By Itto and Mekiya Outini
Everything was going according to plan until Sequoya had to take a shit. “Guys,” she radioed over to Jared and Cleo in the cruiser, “it’s a code brown. Cover me.”
In Heaven Everything is Fine
By Grant Maierhofer
It was June. He sat on the couch, bound firmly in his marriage, his fatherhood, his life. The dog sat next to him, or lay further down the couch on a small pillow.
My Priest Predicted I’d Be a Spy
By Garima Chhikara
My kundali—my Hindu astrology chart—says I must not keep a weapon at home. That’s not even a thing in kundalis. I googled it, checked my sister’s too.
Little White Monkeys
By Manshuk Kali
Translated by Slava Faybysh
The woman lays the ultrasound results on her doctor’s table, to the right of the desk calendar advertising low-hormone birth control pills and next to the life-sized model of the female reproductive system…
Poor Thing
By Claire Salvato
I’d begun practicing feeling the way I wanted to.
Hot Tub Paul Hollywood
By Garth Robinson
Jarrett’s hot tub arrived and my heart ached. What a life of impossible good fortune, I thought. It was the same as if he had bought a one-million-dollar yacht, or a fridge that talked at you and made ice on command.
Montara
By James Nulick
It’s hard to tell time this close to the sea, it’s always grey and misty here, like the sun is camera-shy.
Two Millimeters In
By Jade Kleiner
Doing her mascara, Ashley more than poked her left eye. The applicator went two millimeters in.
To Understand Light
By Ricardo Bernhard
When Porter sits on his favorite bench in late afternoons in March, there’s a quality to the square’s palette that takes him to the faux Eliseu Visconti painting he did while bored in his thirties.
Apartment 304
By Rowan MacDonald
The apartment was on the fifth floor, and the building had no lift. I barely knew where I was, had lost sense of time and place somewhere over the Pacific.
The Sigh of a Man
By Davey Long
camping in the back seat of my boyfriend’s car.
he’s trying to explain engines to me: clutch piston crankshaft axle pressure
Another Place
By Addy Evenson
“Sourwood leaves shook in the Canterville wind. Gusts of humid air descended and rattled the chimes on the porches.”
Of the Lovers
By Addison Zeller
“They are first seen, despite the general darkness, close to the window, from which they draw back prudently, it is to be supposed, in a slow lateral glide along the surface of the far wall.”
Point of Comparison
By Addison Zeller
“Of the lawn, a photograph exists, dated more than a century ago.”
The Robinson-Barber Thesis
By Joyce Meggett
“I want you to understand, it’s nothing personal. I’m going to be completely silent—you should know that. I won’t write notes or gesture or draw pictures.”
Brother From Another
By Jaryd Porter
“Dad’s house had olive siding and a big porch with a swing on it—a loveseat that couldn’t support more than 350 lbs., i.e., less than one-half of me.”
Tiered Rejections
By Stephen Cicirelli
“His brother, a junior and an athlete in high school, was visiting campus. Wanting to show him a good time—and, perhaps, convince him to play soccer there—he bought weed and Banker’s Club to pregame.”
Winners
By Julia Meinwald
“It was in the Self-Help section of Barnes and Noble that April met Justin. She was holding Open Yourself to a Win, a title her over-eager roommate had recommended forcefully to her on more than one occasion.”
Storing Dinosaurs
By Dan Weaver
“After Carmen married Phillip I couldn’t chase her with my lizards no more since it scared Phillip and he would hide in the room and the one time it made it so that Carmen couldn’t drive Phillip to work and he was late and he didn’t want to tell his boss that Carmen was getting threatened with lizards.”
The End of My Sentence
By Roberto Ontiveros
“The deal I had with my people was that I could sleep in. I got up early those last days at the hotel, but not if I knew I had to get up.”
Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse
By Elisabeth Sheffield
“Welcome to Cate’s Upstate, a fashion forward boutique located in downtown Toddsville. The term ‘downtown’ is used lightly, of course—Toddsville is a one-stoplight village with one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two residents as of last Tuesday.”
Leeuwenhoek’s Lens
By Eric Williams
“From the deck of the trekschuit, I watched Rotterdam and its forest of ships’ masts shrink and recede, and with the sight of them went, blessedly, the smell of herring and the scream of gulls.”
from Cityscape with Sybarites
By Israel Bonilla
“The cellphone’s alarm woke me up to a bunch of pillows, a crumpled blanket, and the pungent smell of my armpits. I hadn’t registered Marina’s absence; her belongings were gone.”
The Temperance of Heretics
By Steve Barbaro
“The smokecrazed horizonface. Life beyond the life of each last belief-inebriated beach?”
Selected Dates (1998)
By Shawna Yang Ryan
“The Librarian asked to share a table with me at a crowded café where I was writing a paper. He balanced a wooden salad bowl in one hand and a library copy of Blood Meridian in the other.”
Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46
By Jerry Thompson
“Baby on the way… In this city of red eyes and milk-soaked men, the sky beneath Georgia Boulevard drips onto the disciples of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, clawing away the easy markings that cut the chase into tiny conversations behind the counter of TV repair shops lining the block beside me.”
Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground
By Mary Burger
“I came into possession of the apartment in the way these things typically happen, which is to say, someone died. I was the person deemed by the court, and, if she’d thought about it, perhaps also by her, to serve as her estate executor.”
The Blue Plastic Basin
By Eric T. Racher
“Lying just then on the bed well not bed really not thinking of anything thinking nothing of skin of the heaviness of days of dead starling or grackle not sure which not thinking of the matted old grey longhair who had placed it so lovingly on the welcome mat”
Tabs
By Austin Adams
“The revealed and ultimate truth began, as all things do, on the internet.
James, who’s changing his name to Rick, read that neuroscientists at Cal-Tech— ‘Western,’ Pam corrects.”