photo by Stephanie Ann Farra

by Lily Trotta

When you think of him, start with his hat. The latest in a series of nearly identical hats he started accumulating years, maybe decades, before you were born. The kind of hat Indiana Jones wears, brown felt with a strap around the circumference of the head, sometimes a feather on the side. You’ve always wondered if he started buying this particular style because of the movies. 

He should also have his walking stick—a tall, hand-carved staff his buddy whittled out of a tree,

by Amelia Mitchell

Daniel didn’t feel like an angel. 

He didn’t feel like it when his mother used to cup his face in her warm hands. “You’re my little angel,” she’d say, with a smile so big it closed her eyes. She’d say it on a wide array of occasions: when Daniel brought her crayon drawings, when she bandaged his scraped knees, when he burnt the pancakes he’d surprised her with. “You’re my little angel,” she’d say, even after a visit to the principal’s office, where they’d sat across the table from another boy and his angry parents.

photo by Sherry Shahan

by Duane M. Engelhardt

For a moment he lost track. It was a concern, an omnipresent fear, that was becoming an ever-increasing reality. Lapses in trains of thought. Things becoming muddled, remembered through the haze, and then forgotten again.

By no real authority, other than the respectful commandeering by an old man of a place to stop and rest, scrutinize, and ruminate, he had claimed this bench, this spot in the park. He joked with friends that it was widely known and respected by exactly no one other than himself and perhaps a handful of strangers,

image curtesy of The Public Domain Review

by Brandon Christopher

Wilbur didn’t act like a real monkey. A real monkey would never let himself be dragged down a dirty sidewalk on its back, or wear a leash of yellow satin ribbon around its neck without a fight. And a real monkey would never put up with a heart drawn in permanent ink across its own chest, bordered on each side by a W and an E. This was because Wilbur was not a real monkey—at least not a living, breathing, pink-assed kind of real monkey.

art by Thomas Vogt

by Adam Peterson

That the dream of the new world was another’s nightmare—

We were taught not to worry too much about that, and now it’s our nightmare.

People arrive on our shores from across the ocean. They plant flags in our malls and rename our restaurants like they discovered them. But we did! And we told all of our friends smugly about them as if they should have already known.

What a strange new world this is,

art by Jacelyn Yap

by Mar Koren

The line for the Reading Station stretched three blocks, and rain dripped from the awnings in a constant tempo.

Marion fiddled with his watch impatiently, as the woman in front of him berated her child.

“I don’t know, Jack,” she said for the fourth time, grabbing the child’s shoulder to pull him more evenly into line.

Stop trying to reason with him, Marion thought, shifting from foot to foot because his Converse sneakers had soaked through.