We’re deeply proud of every work we published in the last year.

Don’t Ball the Boss
By Sara Dobie Bauer
A friend called a week ago and asked if I was looking for work. In Hollywood, we’re always looking for work. I’m a personal assistant to the stars, and I’m real good—like Meryl Streep at Oscar time good. They say I’m discreet and subservient; stars like that.

So my pal calls up and tells me there’s this up and coming British star on his way over for a movie premiere. The film is huge, the kind that makes back its budget in a night, and this Brit plays the bad guy. He’s never been to Hollywood. He needs someone who knows the right barbers, tailors, call girls …

That’s where I come in: David Baron, assistant to the stars.

The First to Cross the Bridge
By Chloe N. Clark
One morning I’m sitting in the booth at my favorite café; it’s my favorite because no one ever notices me there and I can sip my coffee for hours and hours. There is a woman at the counter; she’s talking to the waiter about a dream she had. I usually hate to hear people’s dreams because they aren’t meant for me, but this woman has a beautiful voice. It is how a bell ringing in some temple on a mountain would sound, if you were climbing toward the temple and knew it was still a long way off. In the dream she was a shark in the ocean. She was always swimming to stay alive; swimming just to keep breathing. One day she comes across a shipwreck, there is a man tied to the mast of the ship and he is drowning. So, the shark woman swims up to him and bites the ropes. His body spins up to the surface and he gasps for air. He makes it back to land and tells everyone that a shark saved him. She just keeps swimming.

How to Murder Your Friends
By Libby Cudmore
Smother me with a pillow in my sleep, Reese says.

Reese’s blinds are broken and his apartment is too cold. We’re out of beer and it’s twenty past midnight and we’re trying to figure out how we’d kill each other if such an occasion arose. It’s not a suicide pact, just a way to determine the depth of our friendship. Murder is so personal; you don’t know how much someone really loves you until they’ve admitted how they would end your life.

Murdering Reese would involve something sweet, something more gentle than leaving him flailing for his last breaths. Antifreeze, I say. In your Diet Coke. You’ll hardly notice the taste.

Iceman
By Neil Mathison
My son plans a violent act. My girlfriend says she’s thinking of moving out, at least until my son’s attitude improves, and if Heidi suspects violence, something more than a fifteen-year-old’s petulance, I know she’ll leave.

Last August, when Jacob’s mother sent him here, to this Idaho ski town where she birthed him, she declared he needed a change of scene. In new snow, Rachel said, a sapling breathes. Such koan-like utterances pepper Rachel’s speech, leftovers from when she studied to become a Buddhist nun, although in this, as in motherhood, Rachel only half-completed the job. Though what Rachel half-completed, I never began. I intend to make amends.

Plunge
By Joe Ponepinto
Lydia saw the man crouched on the parapet first, and despite being nearly passed out drunk, she shrieked, “That guy! Is he gonna jump?”

Then I saw him outside, perched on the balls of his feet, arms out for balance, butt hanging back into the bar’s third floor patio, gazing down at the street despite the crush of flesh sweating and gyrating behind him in the night air, despite the thumping bass coming through the speakers. The crowd didn’t see. They kept their eyes where they always do, on tanned and glistening midriffs, cleavage, muscled shoulders, fertile regions.

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
By Christopher Wachlin
Beneath a moon sliced cleanly in half, Jason reread the note—his suicide note—and then crumpled it up. He stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and squatted on his haunches. He pushed the note through a sewer grate. The note fell, but got caught in the spiky branches of a seedling growing sideways out of a crack. He found a stick and knocked the note free and it fell again, all the way. Now it would end up in San Francisco Bay, where he hoped to end up. He stood. He pushed his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. He looked skyward, at the halved moon, at the stars, and, across the bay from where he stood in Berkeley, the twinkly San Francisco skyline.

Recipe for Fidelity
By Tracy Elin
Tanya met the hussy when she picked up Gary for Thursday choir rehearsal. But she came up with her plot a few hours later, as she snapped long strands of spaghetti to fit in their little pot, crumbled ground turkey into bits, and chopped through a fleshy green pepper.

Needy People
By Amitabha
The samosa wallah at the street corner is back. His stall now has a blue tarp roof held up on bamboos. When he sees me, he shouts in Hindi, “And, sahab, everything alright?”

“Everything’s great. With you?”

“All fine. Just back from village. Brother’s sons.” He points at the two boys in stained tees hunkered in the small enclosure. With delicate twists of their fingers, they are sealing samosas for frying. The place hums with the scent of salted dough and nigella seeds.

Our Father
By Chelsea Clammer
He’s not the TV character Jim Bob on The Waltons.

He’s not the musician Jim Bob Morrison.

He’s not Jim Bob Cooter—the offensive coordinator for the Denver Broncos.

No, this Jim Bob is a family man—a (good) husband, father, servant of God. This Jim Bob’s specialty is not in entertainment or professional sports, though he is a coordinator. He has to be. Jim Bob’s the father of nineteen children. Nineteen. As of October 2013, he’s aiming for twenty. That’s a lot of coordinating. CEO of the family. Nineteen names to remember.

Poptimistic
By Douglas W. Milliken
It took less than six months for my luck to run out and like a worm under a rock, I was found. Joel. That big brutal fuck. Quite likely the last person I wanted to see. With his fallen prince face and mouth like an open sewer. A smoldering ghost of ruin and violence. Joel and I’d had good times and bad times but our friendship kind of petered off when he went to jail for hassling some young girls, an event that I’d heard he blamed me for on account of I was there when it started and was in a unique position to stop it or join in and instead chose to walk away. Apparently he thought I ought to’ve gone to jail, too. He’s probably right.