The floor drain between my legs was underneath a layer of ice. Craig and I had broken into an abandoned building on the darker edge of what may have been Skowhegan, and we decided to rest a while instead of continuing on in darkness.
Fiction
St. Anthony’s
We’d been playing pretend for almost a year and he still wouldn’t go back to his life. Meade wouldn’t acknowledge he had another life at all, though he’d bring me into it in ways, mentioning how Cole seemed to like me, driving me by the horse farm where he and Cole and his wife had lived before the great domestic unraveling commenced and she moved out to Deer Isle.
Long Shot
This is an excerpt from The Sadness, Benjamin Rybeck’s first novel. Rybeck is the marketing director at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub, among others. He lives in Houston, TX.
Coping Mechanism
I breathe. “We’ve looked at houses in Kennebunk for six months.” I speak slowly, as if to a child. “Nothing is perfect. Or we can’t afford it. Our current home is old, lots of character. It’s our first house. We’ve been there for 24 years. Our children were born there.”
Perhaps You Can’t Help Yourself
He was ten yards behind her when she heard him. In the cutaway on the back of her bathing suit he saw a braid of muscle tighten. He stopped and she turned to him, eyebrows arching as if only curious, her right hand moving in the L.L. Bean canvas bag hooked on her shoulder.
The Thing Carol Saw
The shop lady explained that the little shepherd girl was in fact Bo Peep and that there wasn’t any mention of a shepherd boy in the rhyme, was there? And she even began to recite: “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep–”
Sea Change
He docked that frigid morning as a fog bank settled along the eastern reaches of Casco Bay.
Island Universe*
Winterguide 2016 By Joan Connor We sit and drink, two good friends, in our forties now. We usually drink on Fridays after my husband has left our summer cottage on the island to take the ferry to the bus to the car to drive back to D.C. Diana is my best friend on the...
Shelf-Life
I began to collect books as soon as I could read, and I enjoyed reading so much I very early decided I wanted to be a writer, to my parents’ sorrow, for they wanted me to be a preacher like my father.
Lost Dogs
Walter Rhodes watched a man get out of a trumpet-orange rag-top Jeep in the hayfield in front of his farmhouse. The engine-idling bass drum kicked one-two, one-two, one-two… Wind blasted the old man as he drew near, with muscular tan legs sticking out of khaki shorts, biceps pushing at the short sleeves of a faded red T-shirt. The guy had to be in his 70s, carrying a magazine in his right hand, walking toward Walter’s screen door with a side-to-side gait that said I don’t fall or stumble. Sea legs.
An Open Invitation
My father died this year. No one who knew us would have said we were close. He and my mother divorced thirty years ago, shortly after I had left our New Jersey home to pursue my life. Not long after that he remarried suddenly and settled in a small coastal town in Maine to restart his own life.
Toil & Trouble
This is chapter one of Brian Daly’s Toil & Trouble, a novel about “a high-school sophomore who thinks he’s put the Macbeth Curse on his school’s production of ‘The Scottish Play.’ He’s the author of Big and Hairy, a middle grade novel. He also wrote the screenplay adaptation of that book for a Showtime Original Feature starring Richard Thomas. Look for a staged reading of Brian’s new musical comedy Come Out Swingin’! at the Lyric Music Theater on October 2.
