Category: Fiction

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Haha Lol.

They sent me to Moura, I think, because I’d been shoving MDMA in my school shoes and bombing it in the disabled toilets at lunch. Could have been anything, though. Just a guess. There’s a limit to the number of times you can get back to third period maths, all pupils, wired on the slow turn of a clock’s hour hand. ‘Can you come with me, Kieran?’ someone asked. Could not for the life of me tell you who it was, though. When it came time for a response – which I think whoever’d asked had been waiting on for a few minutes, or maybe just seconds – as to why this was all happening, I shrugged. ‘Laryngitis?’ I wondered out loud, because I was fucked if I knew what the symptoms were. Anyway, where was I again? Moura. read more

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The Walrus

Yolanda walked unsteadily down Madison Avenue, watching her red, kid-leather boots with golden buckles plow through thick snow. Ken called them her fancy-pants boots. Her feet were soaked through and so cold she could hardly feel them. There was something she was trying to remember. What was it? A smell of some kind. She might have walked this way earlier. The snow had been whiter the first time, she was pretty sure, though not totally sure. Now it was mostly smashed down and dirty and wet. A cab shot in front of her—toast! That was it: the smell of burnt toast. Getting a fix on that forgotten smell was one tiny thing she could hold in place on this out-of-place Christmas Eve Day. read more

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The Recovery of Marcus Ray

Marcus Ray is convinced that it’s a man’s obligation to take full control, and that’s paid off for him: married to the same woman for forty-two years, employed by SunCertain his entire adult life, mortgage paid, money in the till. He retired four years ago at age sixty-six, studied the market and invested well, put his son through Boston College and Fordham Law, supplied the funds his daughter needed to open her own gallery in Tucson. read more

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The Transmogrification of Casper Piver

Casper Piver was one of those lonely people who populate the world but go unnoticed, having no family, friends, or loved ones. He’d been placed in an orphanage at two, where he stayed until he graduated high school. When high school was over he was greatly relieved, and anxious to get out into the real world. Not that he had any great expectations, but anything would be better than the State Home. Thankfully he’d taken some vocational courses and found he had an aptitude for bookkeeping. It didn’t hurt that he was suited for it, allowing him his little niche, finding comfort in the straightforwardness of it all. He went to a placement service and was hired as a temp at a downtown industrial supply firm. Things seemed to be mutually beneficial as he was still employed there some twenty years later. He’d even shown some initiative by augmenting his skills at a local business school, auditing several basic accounting courses, which earned him a full-time promotion to head bookkeeper, and made him invaluable to his boss, Mr. Peters. Not a boastful man, he basked in this modicum of success; he was infinitely more secure and confident at work than he was in any other part of his life. Deferential but not obsequious, he got on fine with the handful of employees at the firm. read more

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Sooey! Generis

[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’][/author_image] [author_info] Kimberly Elkins’ bestselling novel WHAT IS VISIBLE (Grand Central, 2014) was a NYT Book Review Editors’ Choice, among other honors. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Slice and Best New American Voices, among others. She was a Finalist in Fiction for the National Magazine Award.[/author_info] [/author] read more