Editor’s Note: In “Paper Cranes,” our second featured short story of November, Emily Rodriguez brings us a story about love in modern times with a little twist of the ancient art of paper folding. Curl up with a mug of a mellow brew and enjoy this story. * * * Paper Cranes by Emily Rodriguez In a weird way it’s like I actually have a use for algebra. It’s always been a game of figures and numbers. Nine steps total, thirty-seven exact creases, ten presses, approximately six pinches and a single tug. But first I need to form x. I fold the square sheet of paper corner-to corner until there’s a perfect x-shaped crease at the very center of the square. But I never solve for x. I fold the factor in on itself. Diagonal….

Continue reading →

Editor’s Note: Our first Featured Short Story for November features a narrator whose cockney British accent and spellings may sound a bit off (think Brad Pitt in Snatch), but rest assured, it’s all part of Mr. Craven’s master plan. * * * Disaster of the Will by Richard Craven A filmy substance welds shut my eyes. I free an arm from the embrace of the twisted mildewed blankets that I have grown to know and hate, prise apart my eyelids, accustom vile jellies to gloaming. The evidence of my desuetude: mounds of unlaundry, overflowing ashtrays. Crushed cans of Horst Wessell Marching lager littering the pitifully cramped floorspace. Once again I have slept in my clothes. I peel a corner of the orange curtain and peer outside. The mountainside, muddy, denuded of grass by ramblers’ boots….

Continue reading →

Silly or Young How silly I was then, Or maybe too young To see that the darkness on the wall Was just myself Reflected.   The wooden night-light That carved the image of a withered tree Standing, still in moonlight That’s what made it bigger   That’s why I was afraid.   So I cowered under covers, Silly to think my blanket Could shield me from my monster Too young to know I’d never really Escape it. ***   The Nights Are the Hardest  “The nights are the hardest,” she’d said. She was right. Night came. So did total destruction. Dark winds howled, pushed me, dragged me off my perch, down with a thud. Clay skin cracked, pieces of me spread across cold cement floors. Then came the winged creatures. They tore at me, scratching…

Continue reading →

She had one of those yards that embraced the desert. Jimmy appreciated that. Instead of battling the cracked earth, bullying it into producing a lush green carpet of grass, the area around the small terra-cotta ranch was covered with carefully combed pebbles and dotted here and there with decorative rock gardens. The fence was weathered, cowboy wood, and against each fence post leaned an old-timey broken wagon wheel, never a circle complete. Cacti twisted toward the sky, nestled in with otherworldly species, spiny and savage and casting a forest of sharp shadows. Jimmy eased the van up the cracked drive and turned off the engine, the sweet breath of the air conditioning dying against his face. He grabbed a large black duffle bag from the passenger’s seat and went to the door with swift, purposeful…

Continue reading →

“Can you believe how pissed he was?” says Lenore. She holds up a thumb and forefinger. “He came this close to telling us we’d never work in Atlanta again.” It’s opening night, half past midnight, and Morris Champion has just closed Titans. Lenore, Alicia and I are commiserating over coffee and doughnuts in the Buckhead Diner. There’s a clatter from the kitchen, the crowd is loud and boozy, and I’m uncomfortable that we’re shouting. A finger to my lips, I nod in commiseration. “He’ll get over it,” says Alicia, in a surly sotto voce. Her black curls are aquiver, the muscles in her prominent jaw tense. “He’ll remember refunding two weeks of advance tickets, that the Concord is sitting empty. Common sense will strike him dumb, and we’ll be on again.” “I don’t know,” I…

Continue reading →

DEAD MAN PLUS INDIFFERENCE In the fading light of a city block, a soul’s stretched out on the bed of a second floor tenement, smeared with goo that attracts insects, shiny black things mostly: one that crawls across his lips as if testing his breath for takeoff, another with a wobbly gait like a drunk on a spree that finally drops into his earhole. On all sides – percussive indifference – staircase trampled by incessant feet, room above a cacophony of chair scrapes, apartment below, an interminable coughing fit, outside, traffic noise and the usual sidewalk hoodlums, loud veterans of their own impatience to be richer than their friends in jail. Dead man’s unmoved by the world around him as he is by the tiny creatures clinging to his skin. In better days, he would…

Continue reading →

Seated on a three-legged stool, Neuheisel inhaled the steam rising from the cup of Costa Rican coffee then with a soup spoon broke the thin crust that began to appear at the surface of the cup. Briefly he closed his eyes then filled the spoon with coffee, leaned over, and noisily slurped it into his mouth. Jenny, the young woman he was training to be a barista, smiled. For a moment he let the coffee sit on his tongue, making sure it touched all his taste buds, then spit it out into a large brass bowl in the center of the table. “Now it’s your turn,” he said after filling her six ounce cup with coffee. Again she smiled, sliding a little closer to the table. “First off, you should identify the aroma. Is it…

Continue reading →

Waking from a Nightmare I am awash in the terrible seas of the night; dream waves lift me and drop me. Every hollow is a deep pit: water for drowning is its floor and I am sure to go under. Gold could be lead in this lack of light, and the sea so big no one could measure its changes. I am rising through blacknesses, drowned in the bleak shutting out of even the sheer blasts of the weather. And as I am rising, utterly lost, the dark water leaching my last warmth you are there soft in the bed beside me, the mercy of your flesh draped exactly on your skeleton. Your body posits axioms of warmth as you draw breath, confident as the geometer in the sand, and though the soldier strike you…

Continue reading →

Not only had Kimmy visited star systems far beyond the ken of her race, but she had left behind, in all viable places, descendants who copulated fruitfully and who lived twice the natural life span of her species. Though she had wished for a corner of the community chambers, what she had been granted was something far more wondrous. The adventure began when Kimmy returned home between trips of campers. There were three shifts and she was on payroll for the entire summer. Though both Ross and Dad had written to her, there was nothing like her familiar hibernaculum to ease her to sleep or to bring on handsome dreams. Sadly, Dad’s handwriting was becoming increasingly illegible. Like many great omnivores before him, he suffered from a combination of Fatty Liver Disease, Lethargy, and The…

Continue reading →

Her name rolls off my tongue like a sweet puff of smoke. She is a potent mix of innocence and caution with vibrant black hair, smooth alabaster skin and a slender willowy frame. She seems completely unaware of her own beauty. And she is here, in my apartment. She was reluctant, at first, to stop by. She had heard far too much about me from a misguided co-worker who had raised the red flag. She wouldn’t say his name, but I knew who did the trash-talking. When time permits, I’ll have a little chat with him, make sure he knows not to stick his nose in my business. She stood there, yesterday afternoon, in the drab grey-carpeted hallway of our stuffy downtown Syracuse office building, her body swaying, reluctance in her soft voice as she…

Continue reading →