On the bus, the guy wants to know where he should go tonight. He’s in from San Diego, sleeping on a stranger’s couch. The strangers are at work and he’s wandering the city by himself.
I explain the difference between East and West 6th—hipster versus drunken college student, older versus maybe underage.
I hear the East Side’s dangerous, he says.
To make last cookies, you first must make not-last cookies—Chocolate-Almond Biscotti, packed in a large tea tin. These you must give to your father to give to his sister at Christmastime, his sister having stayed home in New York City, as she was too ill to visit Boston for the holiday.
Of course, you can’t go so far as to call this a batch of “everyday” cookies, because your aunt is so sick, but they are at least vaguely feel-good cookies because while she’s lost her appetite for almost everything else, your aunt (whom you have always resembled) eats them one right after the other while lying on the couch in the apartment she shares with your father, attached to an oxygen tank and watching Dr. Phil with her nurse’s aide.
Recently some folks have objected to having their work turned down via form letter. We regret that this is a necessary expedient, but there it is. We want to alert all authors who may be submitting work to BLIP that it is our standard practice to notify
Lots of crap phony registrations have befallen us & so we have erased all registrations and stopped registering folk. Taking the ball by the horns. Please forgive if you were a genuine registrant and were erased. Means nothing. Personal.
The new issue is online now, comprised mostly of pieces we’ve published since the Summer 2012 issue. We’re featuring Robert Pawlowski, Bob Hicok, George Saunders, Bobbie Ann Mason,
At Litquake 2012, San Francisco’s literary festival, discover flash fiction with a sampler of readings from seven beloved authors and teachers of the short-short form. Blending poetry and prose, these tiny, truffle-like stories are filled with a rare,
We are reading fiction, nonfiction and poetry. If you’d like to submit, please follow the link below, leave a short bio note and anything else we might need to know. We are happy to read work of any kind, any length. Many thanks for your interest.
Our friends at Mississippi Review have published, under the fine editorial hand of Julia Mae Johnson, an anthology of thirty years of stories, poems, essays and interviews published in MR when Frederick Barthelme was its editor.
Sitting beside a suffering, hyperventilating zebra (really a horse with stripes) was not new to the women in my family. My mother had experienced it, as had my grandmother and my grandmother’s grandmother. Now it was my turn
“For every pot there is a lid,” my mother said before she died. Nobody knew why she said it or why only females cried.
Here it was again, a life and death moment in the animal kingdom calling for human compassion. In many ways this experience would be no different than fishing for compliments from a bored husband on weekends.
We’ve just put up a new section of a new novel from Mary Grimm along with an interview in which Mary talks about publishing on the Web, e‑books, and other topics that might be of interest to our readers. Click the following link to visit Mary Grimm.
I see my ex at the grocery, pecking at fruit, those new mini-watermelons. I catch the back of her head, her red hair, from the automatic doors, her purple tee from two years ago’s 5K for dystrophy. One change: Her left arm is gone, the short sleeve tied into a knot at the shoulder.
Congratulations to Dorianne Laux and George Singleton both of whom have had work from New World Writing selected for inclusion in the new edition of Best of the Net, due out soon from Sundress Publications.
There’s no reason to call each other Tic and Tac, but we do just to keep up with that kind of childhood bond, the one formed accidently because parents put us together in rooms and in cars, bound into seatbelts and bunk beds. You’re almost always wiling to share your caramels, sticky in the white bag, sea air melting them wet. I say, “It sucks that dad’s a faggot,” and you say nothing.
Julia knocked on the door and I answered in a pair of ratty blue jeans, holding a putter and three golf balls. She had a friend with her, a teenage boy, who did all the talking at first. He delivered a scripted speech about creation versus evolution, and read from Hebrews something that said
WE’RE READING NEW FICTION AND NONFICTION with an eye toward the April 2012 issue. If you’d like to submit, please follow the link below, leave a short bio note and anything else we might need to know. We are particularly interested in work of medium
The man behind her said, “Let me ask you a question,” but she didn’t turn to see what the question would be. Something about what he said bothered her—it was the way he put it. She was out of sorts today, but, nevertheless, what he said was not the same as asking, “Can I ask you something?” Or saying, “Excuse me, I’ve been wondering…”
The mailman delivers the package on Tuesday. I rip open the small white Fed-ex envelope and a clear zip-lock sandwich bag falls out from between two pieces of cardboard. Inside is the necklace—a large metal cutout of two fists side by side with pinkies extended. “Too much rock for one hand.” It hangs from a cheap metal chain.
He had been watching her for four years—watering her plants, grooming her plants. First in grad school, then when they moved in together in Cambridge, and later in their first house as a newly married couple with house plants. It had taken years for him to credit: to observe, to suspect, to hypothesize about, and finally to believe.
Hello there, I say, and you’re stunned, so stunned you don’t say anything back, you just stare, stare open-mouthed and silent like I’m a ghost. And okay, all right: that’s what I am. People eventually stop calling when calls are not returned. The reflection in the mirror starts to look like someone else—or no one at all.