"Marketplace Children" is the story about of farmhand Jovita who deals with the reality of her place in the world. Jessica Santillan's haunting short story debut.
The thing about laboring all day in the sun, she thinks, is you can either focus on the misery of the task, or on the misery of your life. Sweat drips and collates in the creases on her face. She is machine, without the luxury of being machine. Ay, she thinks, even machines get to break down sometimes.
Jennifer Todhunter's short story "Soup & Nail Polish" is a story of friendship built on music and nail polish, and what happens when past traumas come back to haunt.
I’d bring home random scraps of the city for Harry—rare finds from used book stores, shades of nail polish we both could wear, ballpoint pens liberated from businesses—and make him pizza and soup because he wasn’t interested in eating anything else. He didn’t want to talk about what was going on, and the more I pressed, the more withdrawn he became.
"Beer Mile" combines exercise, competition and beer. What could possibly go wrong? Find out in this short story by our Writer of the Month, Sarah Szabo.
So they began the regimen, cramming what they could into two long, grueling months of prep. The goal was learning how to run plowed, keeping the booze down. He’d had years of practice running, good form, and the genetics of a true rake in him. All there was to do was get used to the feeling of running a full sprint while a liter and a half of cold beer wreaked havoc in his gut—to make it as close to second nature as they could.
Two co-workers bond in Lisa Bubert's short story, "Hand For Your Hip."
Zoe is twenty-eight, unmarried, without children, and not beautiful but not unbeautiful. She comes in to work every day dressed as if she is a different person, her make-up and hair changed so strikingly, it is not unusual for regulars to ask if each day is her first day. Today, she is stunning and elegant. The day before, she lined her eyes thick, left her hair unbrushed, and replaced the stud in her nose with a ring. George has seen her hair dyed blonde, black, pink, and now this deep, dark red. He likes the red but the blonde is his favorite. When Zoe wore blonde, she wore it white and curled like Marilyn Monroe and she walked with the poise required of it. The world rotated around her presence -- the books, papers, and people around her but waves on the sea and she the magnetic core.
"Fit of Inspiration" by Sarah Szabo, our writer of the month, is a short story about a man who is having a day where nothing is going his way. It all starts when someone tears out half of the last page.
Karl bit his lip, set down the book. Last page torn out of the sturdy binding. How shitty. Some awful rube must've needed to scribble a phone number and panicked, or just hated the ending enough to damn it to the void. Or maybe they were just sadistic. One crucial page gone and the whole story's ruined.
A little girl spends the afternoon in the library waiting for her father in Jason Buckholz's short story, "Care For Prickly Pear."
The plants she loved most were desert plants which was fortunate because they were often driving through deserts. Her father said Jesus had the right idea when he went out for forty days into the desert, he said that’s probably where he got all his big ideas because man can think in a desert like he can in no other place.
