I’ve been trying to hold onto that perfect moment when you first wake up. In that moment nothing has substance. There is no conscious thought, just the bright light of a new day and you don’t remember anything at all. I’ve found if I hold my breath and don’t blink I can make that moment […]
Lin Oliver is a children’s book author and film producer. She currently heads her own production company, Lin Oliver Productions in Los Angeles. Her work has included the best-selling children’s series, Hank Zipzer, which she co-wrote with actor Henry Winkler from the television show Happy Days. Her television and film productions have won multiple industry […]
Traveler, rest a moment upon your horse’s neck. Look at your companions through the fluttering of his mane: Here. There. Gone. Returned. A thousand journeys, but only one border to cross, An infinite banner, woven from a single shared thread. We are the curtain between two worlds, lifted, rippled, blown by winds we do not […]
On the morning of June 26, 2000, I awake with a weird pain in my right side. I stretch, take a deep breath, and assess the situation. No other symptoms. “I must have slept funny,” I think, as I take my dog Lancelot out to pee. It’s a Friday. A glorious Vermont summer day. My […]
I’m dead. I know what you’re thinking: teenage drama. Now you’re expecting me to say that I missed curfew, or failed math class, and my parents are going to kill me. I wish. I’ve been gone for almost a year. I don’t know why they call it “gone.” I’m still here. We’re all still here. […]
Susan Orlean was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Michigan. Since then, she has lived in Portland, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and worked as a staff writer for the Willamette Week, The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker, where she has been since 1992. Her articles […]
I heard the following ghost story one February evening when I was buttonholed in a corner of a tavern where I’m a regular and go to drink and read or take in hockey games I don’t especially like, no matter I was born in this country. The man (his name was Dunn) was imposing, long […]
The Crystal Rainbows Centre in Morvale is the local loony bin—home for the ill at ease, nut house, window-lickers playground, or as some chavskanks (who have the experience to know) say: “a bit better than prison, innit.” Almost every kid gets terrorized by some older twat at school with horror stories about the place, about […]
It’s the 4th of July and I’ve spent too much time in front of the television, absorbed in a marathon about alien abductions. That night, I decide to light roman candles in an attempt to establish first-contact. If I was the elected Earth’s diplomat, I’d tell you we really mean no harm— that, like they […]
I like to tell people—uncomfortably early in the conversation—how I’ve had three times more therapists than lovers. When someone asks me why I stopped responding to email communication for two weeks, or why I disappeared from Facebook for three months, I might say that I was busy weeping under my desk while curled up in the fetal position. I tell people that I can’t go out on Wednesday…
My secret is not for show, not yet, my uterus no more on display than my kidney or my spleen. I am a private person, my feelings hard to plumb, and has Jimmy ever asked? He cares that I’m a pretty thing, that I eat what’s on my plate, that I listen to his crazy […]
[flash fiction] I believe God thinks in numbers. Most of what I know best can be described with an equation, numbers predicting an outcome, relating the position, velocity, acceleration and various forces acting on a body of mass, and state this relationship as a function of time. And isn’t that what we are, what everything […]
[flash fiction] It happened in a chocolatier in Barcelona called Xococ or a word equally as distressing on the jaw. We were selecting caramel squares like they were prayers or baby names. Glossy chocolate squares stuffed in a satin-lined box. My mind draws a blank of the next four or five minutes. I know we […]
You’ve been writing for only six years and you’re almost sixty. You’ve outlived your mother by five years; you’re feeling the press of time. It’s like the last stages of labor, you know you’ve got to push and birth something. Anything. So what if one of your writing teachers says of your stories, “Two or […]
Jolted from sleep, I lunge for the receiver. Nancy! Nancy! Karen’s dead. What should I do? What should I do? Tell him my name is Diana, that he’s dialed the wrong number? I hang up and now, some thirty years later, wonder: Did I remember to say Sorry? Today, when the phone rings late at […]
Gary Phillips was born in Los Angeles in 1955, a month after Disneyland opened and five months after Charlie Parker died. He attended Cal State L.A. and has a B.A. in Design. Raised in South Central, Phillips grew up playing football in high school while reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of […]
Alan Heathcock’s debut collection of short fiction, VOLT, was released in 2011 by Graywolf Press and was called one of the best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, and GQ, among others. It was an Editor’s Pick for both The Oxford American and The New York Times Book Review, while […]
To R., after Hurricane Sandy The walls are so thin. We can’t beat back the wind, can’t keep the water from entering. Wasn’t I just shuddering beneath you? We both know: nothing belongs to anyone. Jeaette Geraci is a yoga teacher, a belly dancer, and a serious dance club enthusiast. She earned her B.A. in […]
I was privileged to take over editorship of Lunch Ticket after the first issue. I’ve worked at other publications, but this was my first venture into literary publishing. I’d like to thank each and every person who has ever contributed to this publication, and to the hundreds of others like it. Even if your work […]
There’s a girl in a broad-striped shirt with her hands in the back pockets of her Daisy Dukes, legs crossed, one tan knee over the other. She’s standing in front of a fence in front of an apartment complex whose name you do not yet know. Her right knee, creaseless, is the one you can […]
After a certain hour buildings don’t make sense. Lights from across the street resemble nothing, my footsteps knocking on uneven stones, not bothered by their own discordant melody. I would see different people in different rooms, hunched over desks or gazing out at traffic, a phone nestled in the carapace of an ear, mouths shaping […]
In the spring of 2007, my father and I are discussing something important when the guy in the car behind us at the green light raps his horn. In the passenger seat, my father, a polite man of eighty years does not flinch, just glances in the rearview mirror and says, ‟Hold your horses, buddy. […]
Sticky Skirts Fearful of showing more skin than was appropriate for my grandmother’s funeral, I pulled my black lined skirt downward for the hundredth time. The problem was, no matter how hard I pulled I couldn’t help but feel like the skirt was still riding up. I blamed my obsessive thought patterns on the humidity. […]
weigh her down. New York collects under her fingernails as she adds more stones during the eleven-block walk from work. Jane reaches in when groaning cars lurk beside her. With every Nice ass, baby she sends chunks of the city skipping across hoods and through windshields. Tires screech and she takes off running. Jane arrives […]
The Distance On the subway platform, that man with tissue stuck to his chin once lived at the crux of another woman’s dreams. She knew him in the bitter back of her throat, femoral pulse, pop of her ovaries. But now, between them, clear cut of forests, parking lots, hinterland where generations live entire lives […]
I ask Luke to please control the monkey. The monkey is a puppet on Luke’s hand—a floppy fabric imitation of the animal with bits of pink silk for the insides of the ears—and he is ambushing the other children. Luke sneaks up behind a girl who is coloring and grabs her face with the monkey. She screams. […]
My car speeds north along the nearly deserted two-lane stretch of Highway 101 towards Waldport. My muscles are stiff from my hike up Cape Perpetua, and I’m anxious to get back to the house where I am staying for a hot shower. The sky is grey with pending rain and the ocean crashes against the rocks…
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