Julianna Spallholz
short fictions from The State of Kansas

HOME

We argued about what home is. I got the dictionary. I looked up home. I read the definitions out loud. One. The place where one resides. Two. A house. Three. A customary environment; habitat. Four. You rolled your eyes. Wait, I said. Four. A place of origin. Five. To the center or heart of something; deeply. Six. Having an easy competence and familiarity. I put the dictionary down. I told you, I said. You opened your mouth but then you closed it again.

We reside in a house in an environment that is not our place of origin, and though we are accustomed to an easy competence and familiarity, we know that we have not gotten to the center or to the heart of something, deeply.
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John Philpin
excerpt from the crime novel, Bad Dog

CARDEA

In January 1943, officials in Washington D.C. dedicated the largest office building in the world. Our feckless leaders named the thirty-four acre, five-sided home of the War Department, the Pentagon. In August 1943, I fell into the world at Boston City Hospital. My mother named me for her brother who died in the North Atlantic campaign. War and the Pentagon and I were knotted inextricably together. In a burst of Orwellian repackaging, the War Department became the Department of Defense. I kept my name.
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Alissa Nutting
fiction from Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

DANCING RAT

I don’t know if I’m able to have children myself. Because we haven’t been able to conceive, my boyfriend calls our sex “free sex.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the cost we save on contraceptives, the funds it takes to raise a child, what. If I ask, “What do you mean, free sex?” he says, “You know. No consequences.”

Kyle and I have a lot of free sex. Working on a children’s show, I almost feel bad about how very much sex I have.
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Carol Guess
prose poems from Rogue Agent Burlesque

GRAYLAND

Cranberries stain boot soles blood red. Smell of scrub pine and salt. The road stops, starts again across the water. Because there’s no bridge here comes the thrill of forgetting. The light’s green, and holding, but what is it holding? No mistaking this coastline for Finland. Signs sell whole farms: Ocean Spray contract included with bog. No one’s harvested these reds in years. Days of driftwood and rowboats, gumdrops, fisticuffs of school. Grays Harbor drinks from every floater. The night train whistles past Aberdeen Junction. This is how you get here: stay.
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Elena Georgiou
fiction from The Immigrant’s Refrigerator

HUMMUS

Who would have believed that ground chickpeas with garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, formed into a paste, would be welcomed by the British public, and end up on a shelf at Safeway? She certainly wouldn’t have. In fact, she was so unaccustomed to seeing this product outside of her parents’ home, she didn’t immediately register it in the dips section of the supermarket in Stamford Hill.
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