Issues

Blue Dinosaur

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Spring 2015 ♦
1.Rob a Townie I remember stealing only once. It was not the sort of thing a God-fearing girl would normally do. Stealing would set my seven-year-old soul in danger of the Hell fire promised to me every week by Sunday School teachers and weeping pastors pacing the pulpit, raising their…
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Winter 2015 Editor’s Note

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Winter 2015 ♦
In the dead of winter, sunlight is often in short supply, appearing without warning, only to soon disappear again behind a mass of grey clouds. Many of us can’t help but walk around downcast, wearing what Shakespeare called a “February face” in Much Ado About Nothing—“So full of frost, of…
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Interview: David Joy

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Winter 2015 ♦
David Joy is only thirty-one, but come March, this North Carolina writer will see his first novel, Where All the Light Tends to Go, published by Putnam. The book, a gritty tale of “a young man seeking redemption,” is highly anticipated and has garnered advance praise from the likes of…
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Rural Stigmata

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Winter 2015 ♦
I’ve nurtured the glowing wound: peroxide, salve, bandages. I’ve done right by this one. The rawness eased, was replaced by budding infant cells. Trenches formed in the nickel-sized spot where my fate and life lines intersected the injury, two deep vertical red canals in a waxy purple-pink circle: a burnt…
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Still Life in Townsend

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Winter 2015 ♦
1. Stevie Gibson never did like the picture, but she never did take it down. A dead pheasant still fully feathered, a bowl of oranges, a green glass goblet of wine, and an hourglass were arranged upon a pale tablecloth of folds and wrinkles, all against a shadowed background. She…
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Sling Shot

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Fall 2014 ♦
Chalk dust. Is returning really so simple? From the hallway, he can see through the open door of the abandoned classroom, through its far window, and out into the hay fields that lay beyond. There is a single bale rotting against the fence. They would stack them, he remembered, build forts…
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The Apple

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Fall 2014 ♦
People drank the apples          John “Appleseed” Chapman planted       during his Ohio migration to Marietta by catamaran          his scattered orchards slated to be hatcheted in the name of            Prohibition before the Women’s           Christian Temperance Union repositioned the Hard Cider            …
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