Bear Lexicon By Eric Fisher Stone

By Eric Fisher Stone   What can be shown cannot be said. —Wittgenstein, Tractatus   His parents stepped off the trail to film a moose. Next dawn no one found the child except a grizzly sow.   She lost a cub that spring, nursed the three-year-old, milk thundering from her nipples’ dark gourds, his mouth   juiced with butterfat thick as moonlight. Midsummer, he forgot human speech while his surviving cub sister chewed   raw salmon, their stomachs packing fetid meat, raspberries’ lacquer gushing their teeth scarlet. By autumn   he mimicked bear huffs and grunts as wind sluiced pines,…

Paper Houses by Marina Flores

By Marina Flores My mother and I are fascinated by natural disasters and geologic phenomenon. From the comfort of our couch, we watch television shows and documentaries about people who chase storms for a living, putting their lives in danger for a thrill, or for the sake of research and entertainment. Other days, we watch Deadline to Disaster, a television series that tells minute-by-minute stories of individuals who survived disastrous weather. How, for example, one woman hid in a Starbucks restroom from a tornado, the entire building blown over as if the walls were made of paper. Or the two…

Divinations By Will Cordeiro 

By Will Cordeiro  I study the atlas. Our GPS has lost its signal. Glare along the dash. My partner at the wheel. A rush of green. We swerve the mountain roads, a valley sweeps below us. The summer morning, a palpable expanse, comes bracing in our bones. We must have taken a wrong turn at Springerville, near the border with New Mexico. We don’t realize this until we reach Alpine, about thirty miles on, where a man watering flowers in cattle-rustler duds redirects us to make a left at Reserve and another left at Apache Creek. I ask him if…

A Coyote in the Midst by Andrea A. Firth

By Andrea A. Firth Realtors describe my town as semi-rural, a suburb, ten miles from the San Francisco Bay, sort of country but not quite. The highway exit leads four miles down a winding, two-lane road to the center of the town and an aging shopping center. Once a vast ranch owned by a man named Joaquin and his cousin Juan, the town’s land has long been parceled off and populated with clusters of one and two-story houses. The original pear orchards grow untended, a couple of small ranches carry on, and the cows that are left march back and…

The Stash by Katie Dickson

By Katie Dickson Peter’s mother, tanned and laughing in her lime green swimsuit, twisted on the spigot outside the back door. Margo Stiles was unyielding in her cheer, or so it seemed to Peter, and he tried to be happy too. His mother let the water flow from the hose until it ran cool and Peter took a long drink; the water tasted tinny and cold. At twelve, Peter considered himself too old to run under the sprinkler, but he didn’t say so, not wanting to set alight the morning’s disappointment at the pool. Instead, Peter peered at the street…

Foxes and Coyotes by Zach Murphy

By Zach Murphy The tulips grew apart from each other that spring. The ground cracked and crumbled in ways that I’d never seen before. I watched the foxes and the coyotes battle all summer on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, where the blood would leave permanent stains on the concrete. The reckless packs would flash their teeth, mark their territories, and steal more than just scraps. Me, I was a squirrel. I was small. But I was agile. I hustled from sunup until sundown at a frenetic pace. I always minded my own business and stuck to my own path. I didn’t…

Interview: Melissa Febos talks to The Coachella Review

By Jackie DesForges Somehow my conversation with Melissa Febos has drifted from cuddle parties to crime fiction. Febos is one of my feminist icons, and crime fiction hasn’t had the most progressive track record as far as fiction genres are concerned, so I’m surprised we’ve ended up here—and besides, we are supposed to be talking about Girlhood, her new collection of essays. But when the topic naturally begins to shift, I tell her—nervously—that I’m writing a crime novel. She tells me—excitedly—that crime is one of her favorite genres to read, but there is a caveat: “I need the writing to…

THE LAST FAN

Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram, Almost Famous, and As Alone As I Want To Be. She’s a former clinical psychologist, performer and film historian. Her essays, book reviews and short stories have appeared in more than 150 publications. Her play, “Life Without” was nominated for Outstanding Original Writing by the Desert Theatre League and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Pam has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. Fading Fame: Women of a Certain Age in Hollywood is scheduled…

ROGER RABBIT

Wynne Hungerford’s work has appeared in Epoch, Blackbird, Subtropics, The Brooklyn Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, American Literary Review, The Normal School, The Boiler, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. She received her MFA from the University of Florida.