The Long Answer by Josh Canipe  

      I pulled that trigger on principle.  And that’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody, but they don’t want to hear it.  Even Alyssa and Cynthia look at me with their eyebrows all arched, that heart-breaking look in their eyes, when I try to explain this.  Still, it’s true: sometimes a man has to fight to keep things from creeping into his life, from pecking at it until it’s nothing, even if those things are his neighbor’s chickens, which were trespassing on his property, and even if the cops show up twenty minutes later, guns drawn and bodies safely behind the doors of their cars, to confiscate his rifle.  That’s the image everyone in the world seems to have of me right now, thanks to Channel 6, Tabitha Adams reporting.  They see me as a man with a rifle, picking off chickens one by one out of fear....

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The Evolution of Tulips  by  Lauren Yaffe

   I start walking and my mind is blank, calm.  Suddenly I'm furious. I remember an incident:  a woman holding the door as I entered a museum. As I passed through and thanked her, she hissed, "I wasn't holding the door for you!"  I saw, then, another woman behind me, the person for whom the door was being held.  I continued in to the exhibit--oversized canvasses of complex flowers--but for me they were all a blur.  Minutes later, the woman who had hissed tapped me.  "Your rudeness is beyond belief," she said, and walked off.  This all happened a while ago, several years....

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When I Saw Jimmy Coulston by Joseph Scott Celizic

   Before Anne and I broke up, before we took a thirty day break to pray about our future, and before I dreaded her phone calls that flowed like rain runoff into a gutter, her father got us tickets to a boxing match.  It was our first, and neither of us knew what to expect.  I had pictured a mob of Indianapolis’s upper class in a big arena, something similar to the Philadelphia ring in Rocky, but when we pulled up to the one-story Farm Bureau Building at the State Fairgrounds, I knew it would be something completely different....

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Present Imperfect by Suzanne Samples

   Even though I knew how badly she had wanted to go, contacting the universities is not the most difficult of my duties. Using the past perfect tense is more difficult, especially because our past was far from perfect.

    Each story I make different, each excuse a bit more creative; present perfect makes more sense to me, even if it’s a lie. I bet that she would have never expected this level of creativity from me, her scientific-minded roommate who had never written anything other than lab reports....

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Faster Than Youth by Matt Dye

There is electricity in the city tonight and we fly through like two bats out of hell, breaking free.  We’re hyenas and vipers.  We laugh and snake and throw our weight around, and now as the Cadillac hits 85 and we’re rounding the turn, I can feel my balls drop.  This is what being a man feels like.

Tony screams, “Fuck yeah, Mikey, we’re flying.”  I keep my eyes on the road.  I want to see it as it disappears.  Night time, and the headlights cut two holes on the pavement and the dark in front of us.  The Caddy was just sitting there, in front of the Circle K, engine running.  I remembered what my older brother Freddy had said to me after his birthday before he left for college.  He said, “Hey Mikey, the one thing I regret is I didn’t do enough crazy shit when I was young.  Now that I’m 18, fuck, I have too much fun, it goes on my permanent record.”  I didn’t know what exactly he meant, so he laid it out to me as he smoked a cigarette and I watched on the back porch.  He said he’d never spray painted his name on any wall.  He said he’d never really gotten into a fight, or done something real crazy like stolen a car...            

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The Onion Was Me by Paul Michel  

     Not for the life of him would Elliott consider beginning a story like this:

     A man walked into the tavern where I was drinking and set a life-sized bust of John Wayne on the bar. 

     It’s not his style.  He’s come to accept that, for better or worse, he’s a straight-up domestic fiction guy; stories of hospital vigils and turgid summers at the lake house, coming of age conundrums and the jangling triangles of middle-aged romance.  He learned how to write these stories in graduate school, nearly twenty years ago.  He writes them still, late into the night, deep in his basement study, while his wife and two sons sleep in the house above... 

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