Brent Robison lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his wife, a maker of fabulous masks. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and several anthologies, and has won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Read More …

The Ancient My first meeting with the Ancient was also my last. &nbsp It was in a private reading room in the library of the small university where I serve as an adjunct professor of English. My specialty is in medieval studies; but, as the call for such “archaic” disciplines in the days of this Read More …

Mr. Moreno’s Shoes Luis Moreno ate his own shoes—both of them. It wasn’t as if he was adrift on an ocean, alone in an uncovered boat, driven half mad from drinking brine and from the radiation of the sun beating down relentlessly upon him, with no food but his shoes—in other words a desperate act Read More …

Tupperware Party Other things are on my mind when the Tupperware lady says, “First, let’s move your couch over by the door and the table here.” Before her words reach my brain, she’s got one end of that maroon monster, a cast-off from Steve’s mother, waist high and swinging away from the wall. I register Read More …

Locus Amoenus As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples. Then, round a bend, a vista breaks open upon hilly patchwork fields and cow-dotted pastures, with many layered hills growing progressively mistier in the farther distance. Read More …

Effects and Causes It was late at night when he got home. The outside light was off and it took a few seconds to find the keyhole. The door creaked open and his hand reached knowingly into the darkness of his house, as if into a glove. Then he felt along the wall for the light Read More …

The Sound of Snow Apartment A   The apartment brought her a new sense of calm. She thought of it as her cocoon.  Her husband’s death had now moved into her back brain and settled down. The head-on collision. The kid texting. The trial. All of it receding into a low-grade ache in the background. Read More …

A Metaphorical Life At fifty-five years of age he found himself on the shelf. It was an actual shelf in a warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront. An entertainment production company rented it to store extra scenery and furniture. For a time he stored himself there too. &nbsp It was a cinderblock box built in a Read More …

Warfilm He was an ordinary German, walking one night on a Berlin street, near where he lived, when a car turned the corner and followed alongside him at a crawl. He was alarmed. It was obviously the police and he felt guilty of something. He was trying to think what he might have done wrong Read More …

Sophie Last Seen The initial sight of the living room was always a shock, as if she’d forgotten how she’d left it. She inhaled sharply. Years’ worth of ephemera and objects were stacked in overflowing boxes that lined the perimeter of the room then turned into a mazelike pathway shoved next to the couch and Read More …