Fiction Pick of the Week: "Saffron Farm"
A young lover grapples with arrangements and quarantine.
Split Lip Magazine
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Green Frog"
An artist struggles with family loss and complexities.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Other Side of the Reservoir"
Two struggling friends attempt to document a lake monster.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Billings Brothers at the End of the World"
Brothers comes to terms with guilt during an apocalypse.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Repent, Macho Man Randy Savage"
The last years of a wrestling legend.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Bound"
An adopted woman's brushes with fortunes and family ties.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Ringing True"
The lives of a bell maker, a beekeeper, and their observant son.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Re-Stitched"
Two sisters; a grotesque religious ritual.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Poisoned Apple"
A woman fights against various forms of trespassing.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Chemistry"
After moving back home, a woman reconnects with a childhood crush.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Cyber Monday"
Product descriptions propel a complex relationship narrative.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Seeds"
The sprouting of seeds and an uncle's connection to his niece.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "This Bridge"
Scenes from a crumbling marriage, a friendship, a life in the painful present.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Public Debt"
David Hosack attends to a mortally wounded Alexander Hamilton.
"Hosack felt a hitching panic build, his instincts wound too tightly, overtaxed, a clockwork spring about to snap. Only Hamilton could do this to him. The frame prone before him was frail, narrow, woman-small. His coat, waistcoat, shirt, underclothes sopping him up, holding him together. Delicate embroidery sodden, delicate fingers cold with the loss of blood. Hosack had seen this man’s blood before, and the blood and vomit and delirious fever-dreams of his wife, his children. But this was—Hosack sickened, the scene before him tilting. Three years before—Hamilton’s son, Phillip, bleeding out after his own duel on the same Weehawken site. Their faces so alike, their mangled bodies. Their right sides."
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Of Two Minds"
A story of the very complicated demographics of small-town life.
"But I’m no country bumpkin, let me tell you. Cultural institutions in Spencer include a glass studio, a community theater, and a bona fide art school, which relocated in 2008 from the city of Detroit, which as you might have guessed, did not make the cut for Relocate-America.com’s Top 100 Places to Live for 2007. Hence, the art school moving to Spencer. If you’re wondering how a city gets on the list, it says on Relocate-America.com’s website that theirs is the “only list that is determined by statistics and feedback of the people who live, work & play in these communities.” So basically, they take in consideration both fact and opinion and process them in a secret formula to produce a totally non-biased ranking based not just on numbers but also on the enthusiasm of Real People Who Definitely Live There. This explains why we are only three slots down from San Francisco, California on the rankings, because we are definitely on par with a major metropolitan, ocean-bordering melting pot with a majority-minority population of close to a million people where it Doesn’t Snow Ever; anyone who’s ever been to Spencer, Iowa can attest to that."
