
In This Issue

I don’t know if I’ve written anything without changing the details.
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My soul is simple; it doesn’t think. Something strange paces there now.
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The naked trees drifted by, pointing my mother toward the hospital.
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The scream hangs in the past, in the present, and those years between.
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Doisneau might have eyed and shot us for how brazenly we kissed.
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Combat: a series of five new six-word stories from Stanton S. Coerr.
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Her cheek was like a plum about to burst and you had to close your eyes.
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Aim High Olongapo
Gray was a seagoing marine and a good one in that he disappeared into his duties whenever he was at sea. It had been
difficulties ashore that had kept him these three years at the same rank, a rank entitling him to a bottom rack in the enlisted men’s berth. Aboard the USS Mansfield his was an ant’s routine, scurrying to distantly issued commands, calling fools “sir.” On orders, he might go prowling the steel passages in body armor with a scattergun, or running and ducking through watertight hatches, all in the pretense that some plucky enemy had stormed a nuclear aircraft carrier in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Stand by to repel boarders—sure. more
Artificial Tears
Tears sometimes come
in a bottle.
Twist it open and apply drops
several times daily
if you haven’t enough of your own,
if you’ve begun to see light
on a humid night in the country,
black and brooding. Nothing.
And then a lightning strike.



