Tag: creative short story

After Hours

Kareem Tayyar

I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more

Kareem Tayyar

Kareem Tayyar's work has appeared in publications including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, and my most recent book, “Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems,” was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books. His poem, “Visiting My Father in Iran,” received the 2020 Glenna Luschei Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner, and my coming-of-age novel, “The Prince of Orange County,” received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction.

Thinking In/Feeling In

Amanda Reilly

Baltimore, Maryland July 1985 I curled two fingers under the chin of my mask and tore it off. I chipped away at myself with the tip of a syringe when no one else would do it for me. The nurse’s assistant, the friend of a friend’s cousin from the suburbs, Read more

Amanda Reilly

Amanda Reilly is a debut writer based in Philadelphia. She received her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently writing her first novel.

Races, Rules, and Ringlets

Eugene Franklin

The trouble started the day she was born. Before that, really—as soon as the sonogram showed up. She was a she, and he couldn’t register that. He was proof that even some of the smartest gator-poaching hicks remained fluent only in the language of macho: talk of bullets, ballistics, and Read more

Eugene Franklin

Eugene Franklin’s myriad endeavors occasionally achieve something. A brief stint in a Catholic seminary, a few cross-country treks, and an unintentional run at the world record for the number of jobs held are a few escapades aimed at finding his place and capturing the insights embedded in everyday life. His most recent work has appeared in Iconoclast, Wild Roof Journal, and The Alembic.

The Shipwreck of the Ispolen

Emma Wells

For one hundred and twenty-five years, I’ve been nothing more than a watery whisper, dissipating in shifting waves, crumbling to shadowy fragments, perpetually washed upon the sandy shore. My fingers are ghosts stretching longingly and painfully back to Norway, where love was once known. Cruelly, my spirit is trapped here: entrapped Read more

Emma Wells

Emma is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry and prose published with various literary journals and magazines. She is currently writing her fifth novel. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story, ‘Virginia Creeper’, was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Recently, Emma won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with a short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling’. Her poem ‘Rose-Tainted is the winner of the poetry category, Discourse Literary Journal, February 2024 Issue.