29 Mar All Hands Are Red
“What’s a five-letter word for ‘type of bread’?” the old man said, looking up from his crossword and nudging his wife, who was trying to read. “Uh,” she thought, “'toast'.” “Toast…toast? That’s not a type of bread, that’s...
29 Mar The Limb
Crickets — about what I expected from Em, but tonight, they were literal, and all around us. Finally, though, she spoke up: “How am I supposed to see him if he’s in it?” she asked, pressing that tiny, wrinkled face of hers into the binoculars and gritting her...
25 Feb One Bountiful Halloween
I leaned back, appreciating the handiwork of the birdhouse I had quite literally placed the last nail into. My eyes, squinting into the late October glow of an orange-yellow sunset, followed the horizon to the apple tree planted directly out front of my farmhouse. I...
27 Jan Soap Scum
“Six. Seventeen. Nineteen. Forty-five. Twelve. And…Twenty-three,” he finished, the last of the lotto numbers rolling off his tongue, which was suspiciously dry considering the speckles of spit that now clung to the sneeze guard separating him and the attendant. He cleared his throat before wetting his...
27 Jan The Plucking
The following anonymous tip was deposited into the mailbox of the Lincoln Police Station in Lincoln, Nebraska. * * * * * * The ice cream place on the corner of N 48th Street and Vine is a front for human trafficking. It used to be called Soft Serves (and...