Fiction
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Goodbye from the Edge of the World
art by Richard Hanus
by Angie McCullagh
Half hidden by the filmy curtain, I watch a man wheel a human-shaped bag from the house across the street, the gurney rattling over exposed concrete. With hands shrink-wrapped in blue Latex, he shoves the gurney into the back of a station wagon and lowers the tailgate with a muted thunk.
Redheaded triplets live with their two mothers in that house.
I text my neighbor Carla to ask if she knows who died but she doesn’t answer.
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Almost
art by Marc Angel
from Siiigns by Samuel Hamen
Translated from the Luxembourgish by Rob MyattIt wasn’t always easy growing up the son of government employees. Most people can’t imagine what it’s like. Or they don’t want to imagine, as is my right, mind your own beeswax, they shout, talking about us like that, you moron. But, I respond, taking this opportunity to write back to them, it’s just as much my right to counter your narrative. Either way, while most of them say it’s about their rights,
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These Child Stars Were Supposed to be the Next Big Thing and Now They’re Just Joe Sacksteder
image curtesy of the Public Domain Review
by Joe Sacksteder
Amelia Bones, Backyard Paleontologist
Amelia Bones was not the first young person to imagine that an oddly shaped rock in her backyard was a valuable fossil, but she was the first to have a monstrous Cretaceous-era marine reptile named after her. She began the dig just outside Hurricane, Utah, with her best friend Lisa Leoncavallo during the summer between fifth and sixth grade. But once she realized that this was more than pretend, she feigned waning interest so as to avoid damage to the specimen by her less detail-oriented classmate.
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A Review of Michael e. Casteels “Furthermore, the Lake”
by LIT Social Media Editor, Grace Dignazio
Michael e. Casteels’s Furthermore, the Lake is a stunning traversal of a haunted cityscape, narrated by a deeply disoriented, unnamed speaker. Straddling prose-poetry and surreal narrative, the text conjures a setting at once recognizable as New York City and then not—rippling like memory itself: unstable, refracted. The narrator wades through subway cars and foggy streets in a dreamlike state of liminality, his identity a muddled reflection.
The early vignettes usher us into his psyche as he moves through the banal rhythms of daily life—commuting,
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An interview with Alexa Yasemin Brahme (MFA ’22) on her debut novel “Good News”
by LIT Interviews and Books Editor Jonathan Kesh
Good News, the debut novel by Alexa Yasemin Brahme, weaves a web of many different topics from art to immigrant families to dissections of womanhood, but the title reflects the central focus of a young artist waiting for things to get better.
The novel follows a struggling painter named Maggie — although her family and a certain ex-boyfriend know her by her Turkish name, Müjde — as several points of stress in her life converge at once. Her studio art MFA is reaching its end,
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The Outdoorsman
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,
