Fiction
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Taken
"All As We Wish" art by Edward Lee
by Aaron Sandberg
In the driveway, your brother will be burning ants—magnifying glass a tool he will choose to use in other ways than good. He will not come in peace. You’ll read your book on the couch in numbness wishing the universe would nudge you. You’ll wish for wanting. You’ll get your wish.
Above the skyline, a mothership will eclipse the sun, focus a beam, explode the little living things beneath. Some will be spared and abducted. Irony will not be lost. -
The Garden
“The Blue New York Botanical Garden” art by Yuko Kyutoku
by Jessica Payne
Nothing tastes sweeter than that of the earth, you convinced me, as we stood bent at the hips in the garden that summer. We opened our mouths wide and waited for the stalks to thrust from the soil. We lusted for the taste of tomatoes, eaten raw and ruthless like apples, their red juice running down our arms to show insides reversed. We spent hours there, balanced in different positions, our eyes straining for evidence that the ground had broken and a seed was indeed sprouting from within. -
Two Flash Fictions
"The Libertine" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
by Stephen Tuttle
Short-Term Planning
Once upon a time, a man looked into the future and saw that it didn’t include him. He wasn’t old, except by the standards of the very young, and had planned on many more years of good health. When he told the woman sitting at the kitchen table with him, she nodded solemnly to indicate that she already knew. He asked: What should I do, now that I have so little time to do it?
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Woman, 46
"Listen" collage by Tiffany Dugan
by Wendy BooydeGraaff
The morning of my thirty-ninth birthday, my fingertips looked hazy, as if I suddenly needed glasses. When I took off my socks (I always slept in socks, even in summer) my toes, too, were strangely abnormal. Transparent. The toes came back for a few hours on my fortieth birthday, but the day after the obligatory party, other parts of me began to fade in a spotty sort of way. My tailbone, then my left shoulder, the side I slept on. Strange, the sensation of being on the shoulder but appearing to hover above the bed.
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Definitely Better Now: An interview with Ava Robinson (MFA ’22) on her debut novel
Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh
Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is a romantic comedy, or at least it is in part. How else you might classify it is trickier, which is part of its appeal.
The book begins with Emma, the narrator, uneasily but earnestly celebrating a full year of sobriety after a difficult break from alcoholism, which runs in her family and was never quite shaken by her father. Per the rules of her New York Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, she’s held off dating to focus on keeping her own head above water,
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Jakob as Worm
"Still City Full Moon" painting by Nuala McEvoy
by David Leo Rice
This story marks the beginning of The New House 2: The Chapel of Humiliation, sequel to the 2022 novel The New House, about a family of outsider artists roaming the American interior in search of The New Jerusalem, which they believe will only be revealed in dreams. At the end of that novel, an adolescent boy, Jakob, watched his father sacrifice his mother in his stead, and vanish into the woods, leaving him alone with her headless body.
