Category: Fiction

A crash downstairs woke him. The sound of someone stepping gingerly among broken crockery tinkled up the stairs. Someone moving carefully. He grabbed his Remington 870 pump home-protection shotgun from the shelf above the bed.

Darren slowly opened the door to his music room. As he had expected, the floor had disappeared. Staff paper, photographs, web pages, texts, loose sheets with scribblings covered the carpet.

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of a large room enclosed by tall wood walls and a wood ceiling. There is a tiny window high up letting in a dim light above a small dark closet with a little door tucked in one corner where I keep my painting supplies.

Dustin glides his fingertips over the guitar strings. The heat and damp of sweat spreads over his shoulders as he softly lets out lyrics penned days ago.

It had been raining for what seemed like weeks. Whole deltas, river towns, and swaths of civilization were getting wiped off the map on the 6:00 o’clock news almost every night over dinner on the TV.

Katie sips tea at the counter showcasing new evergreen and Santa-red yarns. Amber sways with a chubby-cheeked, five-month-old baby on her hip, gazing out the knitting shop window.

“Oh, Humphrey Bogart,” Amber’s mother sighs on the other end of the line. “Still, I don’t get it – he’s not as good looking as the other guy,” Amber studies the cover of Casablanca, the film she turned off minutes earlier.

Would the boy be full of excitement, grinning from ear to ear? Or nervous about leaving his mother and his comfortable home for their four-day journey? Ronnie was a funny kid.

Amber takes a swig from a bottle of Miller Light. She perches herself on a black barstool at the AC Tap while Martin feeds dollar bills into the jukebox. Kyle, his toothy smile gleaming in the dim light of the bar, stands besides Martin who laughs and runs his fingers through his black hair.

Nancy pushes her retro John Lennon granny glasses to the top of her curly head and reaches for the wide brimmed tortoise shell readers to inspect up-close the expiration dates stamped near the bottom of the yogurt tubs. “August 3rd,” she says methodically, putting another one down on the counter. Though this expiration date inspection […]

I remember pulling weeds in the garden for the first time, my mother standing over me making sure I didn’t accidentally pull out a tulip or one of the pansies, as if I couldn’t tell the difference between the jagged, dark green weeds – some of them with those prickers that stick in your skin […]

A winter gale swept a cutting chill off Lake Michigan down Howard Street. Around the corner by the el station, a line had formed waiting patiently, huddled together against the boarded-up businesses.

Nearly two years ago, highly trained musical analysts from Berkeley technical school in Southern Indiana put into effect “Operation Big Brother.” I know what you’re thinking.

I wasn’t sure why the boots bothered me. They weren’t even mine. Basic brown steel toes. Nothing much to speak of, but there they were – laid out in the middle of the rig. I had to take them off of him around the same time my partner was putting the shock pads away. The […]

Leo Keller pushed his shovel back under the ground. About nine more shovelfuls and he could empty his bucket. The hole was a good six feet deep but the area had a nice water table.

[Editor’s Note: In 2007, Sally Slattery won first prize in the prose category of the Peninsula Pulse’s Hal Grutzmacher’s Writers’ Exposé for the following short story.

Ella and Elaine lived in a second floor, two-bedroom apartment over on Fremont Street for as long as most people in the neighborhood could remember. No one knew their age or whether either had ever been married.

In the late summer of 1941, Ronald Fowler, at twenty-two, still lived at home with his parents in a small rented apartment in Chicago’s Sheffield neighborhood.

The three new bar stools came from EasyMart each with its own compact box. Some engineer with considerable ingenuity had packaged the legs, seat cushion, and other pieces inside the seat back.

So there Greg sat, not saying a word, as he slowly turned the pages of The Cat in the Hat for his daughter, Linda, who was snuggled against him.