Fiction
Gisèle Lewis is a native Bostonian transplanted to sweltering Florida. When not ferrying her children to extracurricular activities, she spends every free moment writing or reading. Her secondary…
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Fiction
Analía Villagra's stories have appeared in Raleigh Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Water~Stone Review, and New Ohio Review, where she won the 2018 fiction contest judged by Mary Gaitskill. She posts…
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Fiction
Courtney Craggett is the author of Tornado Season (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Her short stories appear in The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Washington Square Review, CutBank, and Booth, among others.…
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Fiction
Brian Koukol, raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, now makes his home among the salt breezes and open spaces of California's Central Coast. A lifelong battle with muscular dystrophy has informed the…
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Fiction
Nina Badzin is a Minneapolis-based writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in Compose Journal, The Ilanot Review, Matchbook Literary Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Modern Loss, On Being, Pedestal…
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Fiction
Jeff Hoffmann’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, New Madrid, Harpur Palate, The Roanoke Review, Booth, Barely South, and Lunch Ticket, among others. He won The Madison…
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Fiction
Caitlin Killion lives in Santiago, Chile. She holds an MFA from The New School and a BA from Georgetown University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Aquifer: The Florida Review, The…
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Twenty Miles to Toad River
Fiction
Kyle Stolcenberg is an MFA student at Southern Illinois University. This is his first published story.
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Jeff Hoffmann
I can tell when the lady pulls up in front of the store that I’m going to get her gold. The old gray Corolla has a maroon door and the muffler grumbles loud enough for me to hear it through the glass. Best of all, there’s a car seat in the back. When she climbs out and unstraps the baby, the way her shoulders curl, and the way that she keeps her eyes on the ground even as she walks through the door and up to the counter, tell me that I’m going to steal it from her. Her clean but threadbare shirt, her pressed, old fashioned jeans, and the way her hands shake as she digs the plastic bag from her purse tell me that it’s going to be easy.
You buy gold, she says.
If she looked different, if she didn’t have the baby, if she was hustling, I’d make a smart-ass remark about the fact that she just walked into a store named We Buy Gold Now! Instead I just say, We do.
She’s got a tangle of chains, a watch, and a ring with what might be a really small diamond. The baby…
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