The Hopeful Story People Want to Hear
BY CATHERINE CURAN I. Faith Three weeks before your twenty-fifth birthday you visit a well-known New York hospital to see a specialist, a kindly old
All Fiction
Salon Zine: All Fiction
Bone China
BY NEALE JONES Everyone neglected to tell me that I had a house where my heart ought to be. Maybe they were unaware. Perhaps, on
The Grand Inquisitor Comes to Tennessee
BY JIM BUTLER Even while he was attacking his friend Walter Bob Feston, practically accusing him of being possessed by the Devil, Jackie Barron knew
The Thing About Luzhin
BY MICHAEL MORECI An Excerpt from Baron’s Chronicle Here’s the thing about Luzhin: from the night we met, I knew he was not an honest
How We Remember
BY MIRANDA TRAIN My grandmother has $7,000 under her mattress in case she has to flee to Israel. My father won’t go to Germany, and
Hard-on
Toby stuffed the new singlet into his bag along with a thermal and two sweatshirts, then sat at his desk and logged onto the school’s home page. He needed to see the name again. Plus, he knew his mom would be waiting for him in the kitchen, and if he showed his face before leaving, she’d start nagging him about breakfast, and it would just spiral out from there: from not eating properly, to being too skinny, to the wrestling team, to his father. “You only wrestle to please him,” she’d say, wielding a box of Eggo’s. “Can’t you at least do one thing for me?” If he waited until the last minute, he could simply run by, placating her by grabbing one of her ZONE bars. They’d read Oedipus in his Psych class that October and the fact that he’d never longed for his mother that way had plagued him for weeks back then—though he wondered why they hadn’t named a syndrome for what Jocasta felt. But all that was nothing compared to what he was going through now. He glanced at his old singlet, lying limp on the floor, its lightning crack pattern running up the left leg to become a fireball on the chest. His dad had given it to him at the start of the season, and though buying himself the new black one felt like a betrayal, in trying it on the night before he’d found some relief; its matte fabric was far less revealing.
Garden
At the garden center Lamont bought a tray of mixed pansies. He’d walked a couple miles to get there, braving cold winds gusting off the Long Island Sound, a steady mist soaking his camouflage jacket. And what did he find when he got there? A greenhouse full of ceramic pots. No nice humid greenhouse odor. Long empty shelves where lush potted plants should’ve been on display.
Marionette
Inside their apartment, Samuel closes the bathroom door behind him and turns, with both his hands, the skinny silver lock. He checks for Fita in the mirror. He checks for her after what happened last time she was here, how she snuck up, how he didn’t even hear her coming, how she yelled in her loud Spanish voice, and yanked his hands from his mother’s drawer, how the drawer came off its rollers and everything went falling, spilling out onto the bathroom floor. A hundred tubes of lipstick rolled around their feet. Fita bent down, hugging her arms across the floor, sweeping the lipsticks together.
