Fiction
Zach VandeZande is an Assistant Professor at Central Washington University. He is the author of the novel Apathy and Paying Rent (Loose Teeth, 2008) and the forthcoming Lesser American Boys (Ferry…
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Fiction
Kalila Holt is from Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn. She's previously appeared in wigleaf, and she produces the podcast Heavyweight. People are always asking her, "Did you get a haircut?" and…
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Fiction
Ande Davis lives, teaches, and writes in Northeast Kansas. His work has previously appeared in PANK, Hawai’i Review, South Dakota Review, and cream city review, among others.
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Fiction
Stories from Kathleen Lane’s recently completed short story collection, Deaths I’ve Imagined, can be found in Los Angeles Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Writer’s Digest, Swink Magazine, Forest…
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Fiction
John Hazard lives in Birmingham, Michigan. He has taught at the University of Memphis and, more recently, at Oakland University and the Cranbrook Schools in suburban Detroit. His fiction has been…
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Fiction
Sarah Starr Murphy is a writer and teacher in rural Connecticut whose stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Forge Literary Magazine, Opossum, Menda City Review, and several others. She…
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Fiction
Frank Haberle’s short stories have won awards from Pen Parentis (2011), Beautiful Losers magazine (2017) and the Sustainable Arts Foundation (2013). They have appeared in more than 30 magazines…
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Fiction
Sarah Salway is a novelist, poet and writing tutor based in Kent, England. Her novels have been translated into several languages, and her poetry has appeared in many places including financial…
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Fiction
Daniel Turtel grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He graduated from Duke University in 2013 with a degree in mathematics and has been living in New York City since. In 2018, he won the Faulkner…
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Zach VandeZande
In the morning there’s a body in the pocket-size park off 5th Street. The body is facedown, one arm bent back and one thrown out to the side, legs crossed over one another like a fall is what killed the body, but it wasn’t a fall. There’s blood to tell us otherwise, and the back of the body’s head to tell us otherwise, hit with something hard by someone strong. The body is attended by the statue in the park of a chimpanzee, Washoe, the first to communicate in sign language, and here above the body the statue signs also with its bronze hands: friend.
We are a small town with a college. We loved the college, which kept mostly to the north side and a few of the bars. We loved the sense of connection to the larger world that the college brought. We didn’t attend the plays on campus, and we didn’t visit the art exhibits, but we liked knowing they were there. The body belonged to that college—it must have, as the college drew students from all over our state to this place. This safe place.
This is a place where a woman might spin her…
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