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The client turned out to be an older man, a lawyer nearing retirement.
I met him at his office downtown, where he gestured for me to sit across the desk from him, as though I were the client and his were the services we were there to discuss.
—From "The Postcard," a short story by Bennett Sims, Socrates on the Beach, Issue 7. It was included in his collection Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2023). My other favorite from the collection was "Unknown," which originally appeared in The Kenyon Review.
At the end of the summer of 1995, I had finished all my credits for high school and my father handed me twenty dollars. That's the last you're getting from me, he said. Either I had to enroll in the community college or start paying him rent. No, he said, let me rephrase that: you're going to pay me rent and I'll pay your tuition at the community college.
—From "My Life on the Streets," a short story by Jared Hanson, Bodega, Issue 134 (March 2024).
It's around six months or so after society has begun changing, mainly for the worse, when Lizzy and I decide to take that trip we've been talking about for so long, and which, only in hindsight, is probably our biggest mistake, i.e., not knowing what we're getting ourselves into.
—From American Estrangement, a short story collection by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (W. W. Norton, 2021). This segment is from "Scenic Route." Please note: the sixth/next-to-last story in this collection, the one with the metaphor in the title, contains an uncomfortable subplot that may not be for everyone.
Math was tricky ground for him: it could be useful, but was often frivolous. He saw math as the thin edge of the entertainment wedge, as if, once you engaged with Fermat's Last Theorem, reality TV was not far behind.
—From "Houyhnhnm," a short story by André Alexis, The New Yorker (June 20, 2022), pp. 52-58.
Starlings chitter up in dawn-light. Slip-of-a-dog, a languid coyote, steals between houses,
—From "Clockwork," a prose poem by Joni Wallace, Rhino (2024).
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