On "Heller" by Julie Innis (5219 words) ***

Teachers marrying students, students dating teachers. These are the things of tabloids. But change that story to the boyfriend of the teacher, and leave the student out of it. Have the boyfriend become jealous of the student(s). It's not tabloid material, but it's quite creepy in its own right, reading about a boyfriend who stalks his girlfriend's students. The boyfriend in this story is someone we might imagine as such, bored, out of work, with too much to do--why not think about what the girlfriend does during the day? Why not suspect the worst? Why not one up her? Read the story here at Battered Suitcase.

On "Look Me in the Eye" by Suzanne Nielsen (506 words) ***

There's a scene in Full Metal Jacket where a character who has gone from a full screw-up to a clean-cut, amazing solider flips. Things seem fine, and then suddenly he's using his gun in ways you don't want to see repeated. Nielsen's story does a similar thing, focusing on such a moment, and drawing us into its full absurdity and ultimately sadness. Read it here at Battered Suitcase.

On "Breaking News" by Eric Hawthorn (1483 words) ****

Sometimes a story comes along that does something I haven't seen in print before. I love that when that happens, and the older I get and the more well read, the less often that does. In "Breaking News," the author chooses to slow down the narrative so that we watch everything in slow motion, only like some weird video (I'm thinking about a Radiohead video at the moment, and also a U-2 video), everything else continues in real time. This is totally cool. Read it here at Battered Suitcase.