Category:Volume 3

Deliver Me

Rachel Yoder

That summer before I left, the cicadas descended on Road’s End. They’d been hibernating in the ground down by the tree roots since the year I was born, still and deadlike for seventeen long years until mysterious waters inside them began to stir again.

Russian Winter

Daphne Kalotay

The winter I was twenty-five I met once a week with a professor of Russian named Lawrence Tillbear. This was in Boston, where I was working toward a Ph.D. in European Literature, studying for a qualifying exam in Russian fiction.…

Life Under the Cloud of Unmet Expectation

A Meditation on Fame and Artistic Longevity, Steve Almond

A lot of what I do as a writer boils down to making obnoxious assumptions, so let me start with one: if you’re reading this, you’re an aspiring writer, or an aspiring musician, or both. The first thing I’d like…

Canyon

William John Bert

Just as Leah opens her mouth to tell him she’s pregnant, Russell says, “There’s something blue down there.” The canyon rises to Leah’s left and falls on her right. Without her glasses, it offers only immediate, myopic pleasures—scrappy scrub brush,…