Yule Tidal, by Quentin Paquette
“Nicholas! Is that you? You’re home just in time.”
He steps into the dining room. Dinner is on the table, candles lit, bottle open and breathing. Chairs wait close together at the corner of a table set for two. The smell of their favorite meal inspires a deep inhale through his nose. He pauses for a moment to think about the evening that could have been. It all seems so perfect. Surrendering a deep sigh, he follows her voice into the kitchen.
“Yes, Nona, I’m here. Everything looks so good…” the pitch of his voice rises as it trails off to a whisper.
“Oh no! What is it Nicholas?”
“The reindeer, I hear they haven’t been eating anything today. I need to go check on them, tend to them. I can’t have them getting sick at this time of year.”
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The Anonymous Op-Ed Writer(s) Revealed, by Meryl Baer
The men and women huddled around the kitchen table clutching mugs of coffee and tea. They hunched forward and talked nervously in muffled whispers, afraid hostile ears lurked nearby.
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That Tiny TV, by Rose Marshall
Wheel of Fortune. Every day. Every damn day that’s what she watches. It’s like she has to watch it or else she’s miserable and we can’t watch anything else. If I want to watch something else, she, like, freaks out and says that I have my own television in my room. She knows how small that TV is and she wouldn’t watch it if she was forced to either.
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Coffee Run, by Rae Richmond
“Did you know this song is about heroin?” My friend Chris asked.
“Huh?” I said as I approached a stop sign.
We just left a party where my gay friend made out with a girl for the first time and I got vomited on.
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No Right Turn, by Katherine DeCoste
“I’ve got this bad habit.” I’m twisting the cold wine-glass stem around in circles, leaving marks on the tablecloth. “I can never finish sucking the mint. You know? I always crush it in my teeth.”
The man looks at me through wire-rimmed glasses, a bit of goo in the corner of his brown eye.
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The Mountain Awake, by Hunter Conway
I signed up with a temp agency because contributor copies won’t pay the bills. At the time, I was already moonlighting as a scarecrow, but my wife was sick of shucking corn and boiling water, so I took a job throwing fireballs at the sun. The gig didn’t last long, just a few weeks and then a few more hours after those few weeks.
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three: number 33, by Rudy Martinez
While we embraced I wished that we had somehow missed the news alert on our phones revealing to us that nuclear war had broken out.
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