You’re not a loser until you quit trying, Coach thought to himself, watching as his players pissed and moaned their way to another loss. They seemed half asleep, committing lazy turnovers on offense and arguing with one another instead of hustling back on defense. Thirty years coaching high school basketball and he couldn’t remember a […]
Fiction FEATURED AUTHOR: Ruth Ticktin’s Returned
At a stuffy banquet honoring soldiers who fought the Great War, a man approached Mollie and whispered in her ear. “Casualties, thousands needing immediate treatment. Transporting them to an old monastery. Working crazy, all hours. Death, over and over.” His head drooped low. “Too many dying. We loaded soldiers on stretchers, train cars to makeshift […]
Fiction Lilydale by Zach Murphy
The waters of the Mississippi River were higher than the high school version of myself on a Saturday night. I willed my rusted sedan down the winding bends of Lilydale Road, nervously hydroplaning through dirty, cloudy puddles. Lilydale Road didn’t feel the way it used to be, because it simply wasn’t the way it used […]
Poetry: Blue Pines by Scott Thomas Outlar
Blue Pines I consulted my stars during a dry spell in the plains they told me to lie down in the grass make a blanket of the leaves told me to build a fire in the season when the sky grows cold told me age is just a number until it kills you warm in […]