On "Pointing East, Where Things Happen" by Donna Baier Stein (3770 words) ***

Is he or isn't he? When a man has an affair, it's hard to trust him ever again--that's the angle in this story, centered on a revival meeting and a mysterious bracelet too small for his wife. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "Stalagmites" by Christine Hennessey (2676 words) ****

A cave takes on metaphoric undertones in this tale of a marriage on the brink of ending. A child tries desperately to keep her parents together on this final vacation together, where for a brief moment there is a bit of hope. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "Envy" by Alyce Lomax (2180 words) ***

"Envy" tells the story of A Star Is Born in a way. In that film, one star takes a dive while the other rises; here, one never quite rose, but as the other person in the couple sees career success rise to ultimate heights, it's too much for the other. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "Country Lepers" by Brad Felver (6823 words) ****

Who's helping whom? That's a question posed in Felver's odd letter to his narrator's new lover. Divorced from his old living situation, the narrator goes to live with an old man who has something of a skin condition, an old man who is willing to put up with the narrator and his obsession with his former wife and her new boyfriend. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "No Cat, No Father" by Alana Ruprecht (4285 words) *****

If you told me you were going to tell me a story about a father who comes back to your house as a cat, I'd say that you were not likely to succeed very well. I'd expect a lot of disbelief on the part of the characters, a lot of questioning about how the father got to be this way. Ruprecht does none of that, however. A dad can become a cat, and everyone in the story knows it. It's just a fact of life, the way things are.

Instead, the characters focus on how to deal with the cat. You see, the father was not a good man--and he's no better as a cat. He expects to run the household, but he doesn't expect to work to provide for the household. He's lazy and selfish. He's a cat.

And he's cute. You can't help but like him on some level, to want to take care of him, and in that is the danger. He's a cat.

I'm sure that some scholar has written about how pets are replacements for children and for lovers in our contemporary world. Ruprecht takes the logic of that, the implication of that, to its full extreme. What is love, and how well can an animal fill in for the things that are missing from our lives? Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "A Sea Change" by Jean Ryan (3595 words) ***

Ryan's tale takes both elements of the title and renders them concrete. The story is one of change and one of the sea. And it's one of love--different shades of it: mother and daughter, girlfriend and girlfriend, woman and animal, woman and work, woman and food. In any relationship, we only control one-half of the partnership, and that certainly comes to the fore here. Mom can't control daughter, girl can't control friend. We develop on an arc all our own, and love, it seems, is just the element of being there during the time that arcs intersect. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "Flight" by Katherine D. Stutzman (2629 words) ***

Imagine if the Weekly World News' Bat Boy were real (oh, but he is, some probably are saying). Or imagine that instead of the Garcia Marquez's man with enormous wings landing in a town that cared little for him, that man grew up in the town. These are essentially the premises of Stutzman's story. A young girl grows wings. The town reacts. What, one may ask, is that reaction? Being different--so different--means that the girl is lonely, and this is what the story becomes, a mediation on that loneliness, on that desire to find someone who can appreciate her and the consequences when no one does. You can find it here at the Summerset Review.

On "A History of Lies" by Sarah Kuntz Jones (5658 words) ***

Jones's story has all the markings of a well-structured tale. If I were going to map a short story, give readers a lesson on how to write one, Jones's piece might serve as a model, with its rising action and its climax. The piece is about one Odile Johnson, an "old maid" (at least in the 1940s) who chose to care for her mother rather than run off with a man. Not liking to draw attention to herself, Odile has crafted a life of denial--denying what she really wants and, in the process, denying others what they want. And like a well-put-together story, Odile, through the mysterious arrival of a meteorite, is forced finally to confront her own desires and to change. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "No Mess Allowed" by Maria Kusnetsova (7750 words) ***

I knew where this story was going to go about 10 percent of the way in, but that seemed okay. What drew me to the story was the narrator. Kusnetsova does something that isn't easy here. She tells the story from the point of view of a middle schooler, but also from the point of view of someone much older looking back on that time in life. The second point of view, however, is mostly in the background, so we mostly feel as if we are in this twelve/thirteen-year-old's head.

The story is about friendships, the way that they fall away from us as we age. I'm reminded of something an acquaintance of mine once said, how friends were only made to last a few years. I've been blessed with a few that have lasted decades, but on the whole, that observation is correct. As we age, our interests change and our priorities as well. Beyond that, circumstances change. Friends from work, for example, aren't so much friends anymore once work isn't held in common, except in a few rare cases. We move on. And yet, we also grieve, and that's what this story is about. Read it here at Summerset Review.

On "The East Elevator" by Nicholas Rinaldi (5720 words) *****

This story is a haunting. I'm reminded for some reason of the end of a movie called The Vanishing. It's got a similar kind of eerie feel in places, and yet, this story is a whole lot more subtle than that movie, for we don't necessarily know where it will go.

The story is about an elevator. As a kid, I loved elevators. I think that's because they were like amusement park rides to me. I liked escalators too. But since elevators were rarer, I preferred those, looking forward to the trips to the local Bullock's department store to use that elevator, the only one I bothered to ride with any frequency, since most others were off limits to us kids.

By age twenty, the elevator had lost its appeal. Perhaps it's that I lived in an apartment building with one, and it was not a thing I enjoyed. Sure, using the elevator to move furniture is (somewhat) easier than pulling furniture up and down stairs, but there's the waiting for it, the noise of it, the people inside it, the boxed-in quality of it.

On weekends, at my current office building, one isn't supposed to ride the elevator, because if it breaks, you'll likely be there for two or three days. In a previous job, a two-hour stay in the elevator is exactly what happened to some coworkers of mine. The elevator is a trap.

This story is about elevators as well--good ones and bad--and elevators as traps. It's about a woman named Lily who finds herself boxed inside and how that changes her life once she gets out. This aren't large changes, but they're there, and we get a sense that the elevator isn't just about moving us up and down a building but also forward, into futures we don't necessarily want to know about. See what's inside the box here at Summerset Review.

On "Baby's Breath" by Jason Kapcala (7370 words) ***

The film Out of Sight, a seemingly commercial vehicle for George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, starts, as I recall, with a scene of Clooney throwing his tie on the ground as he leaves an office building. It seems to have little to do with what comes after, except . . . an hour or so later, we see that scene again, and the meaning becomes clear. We were watching the future, and we didn't even know it. Such is the genius of Steven Soderberg.

Jason Kapcala's story uses a similar technique. That moment, in prose, takes on the aura of a memory, something vaguely familiar, and it works well here, because the story is about a summer job right after high school, before heading off to college. For me, this time in my life was one of great hope and longing, and of endless disappointment. The narrator here, working at a nursery (for plants, not babies!), goes through some of the same emotions, largely caused by one coworker. All the characters in this piece seem spot on. A good read is to be had, here, at Summerset Review.

On "The Side Bar" by Jean Ryan (4242 words) ***

Stopping in Dodge City on my way across the country when I was twenty, a lifetime resident of Southern California, I was struck by the fact that out here, out in the middle of the country, there weren't a thousand people trying to break into film. I was eating at Dairy Queen (for lack of any restaurants in that time and place that weren't fast food), being served by people who weren't aspiring actors. It's one of the reasons that living outside Hollywood is more relaxing. You don't have to try to be something else. You're not in a constant struggle to try to be something bigger than life--and you don't feel like you're settling for something less if you don't take part in that struggle. Ryan recounts a woman who likes her small town of White Horse, Nevada, for similar reasons. Not so many choices. You have one restaurant, one grocery, one hardware store. And if you walk into any of these places, the chances are good you know who you'll see.

In the case of Ryan's narrator, who you'll see as a bartender are the town's troubled, sad, lonely, and aging. I'm sure that bartenders everywhere see plenty of these sort of people. Living where I do, in a college town, where drinking establishments are more numerous than hot dog buns in a football stadium, I'm a regular at the bars. Here, the bars seem like happy places, and I guess, on a superficial level the bar where Ryan works is also. People come to socialize. But what type of people? As here, many of them are there only because there is nowhere better for them to go. They are troubled. They are sad. They are lonely. They are getting old. But for a few hours, at the bar, they have friends, comrades, people to drink with, and they're happy, and all does not seem so wrong with the world.

Landscape is big in this story, though, and the surrounding desert plays its very important part, swallowing up everyone and everything that sits inside it--including the occasional bar patron. Read all about it here at Summerset Review.

On "Singing the Bone" by Alison Christy (4414 words) ****

Something is oddly chilling about this piece. I believe it's the focus on cadavers and on dissection, and yet the focus works so well here--and could work well in so many kinds of stories. Here, bodies get dissected--dead ones, but also living--as well as lives and relationships. Take two women, two spinster sisters, and throw into the middle of them a man, available, interested. Who gets him? Why? What's best? Or is love best left alone? Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "Men, Women and Chainsaws" by Joy Wood, "Traveling East" by Kelly Lenox, and "Captions" by Scott Garson *****

There's something mysteriously disturbing about Joy Wood's poem on the connection between cutting things (fear) and joy, between men and women. But it is those connections that we don't see otherwise that poetry is often put to use to make, to make us rethink. Read the poem here at Elimae.

Given the brevity of many a poem (and generally speaking the poems I like most), a single extended metaphor will often do. And that is certainly the case with Kelly Lenox's "Traveling East," which draws some interesting parallels between the sun and a lover. But how what makes this poem work well comes in what it suggests in the last couple of lines. Read the poem here at Summerset Review.

Garson's "Captions" is a exactly what the title states--a collections of captions from photos we can't see. I never thought a set of captions, sans pictures, could be so evocative and personal, but Garson does it. He makes me want to get out the old yearbooks and cut out the pictures and just read the cutlines. Would they be more interesting? A former yearbook caption writer, somehow I doubt it--we agonized over those things, and they were rarely as good as these. Read the captions here at Elimae.

On "I Am a Famous Writer" by Robert Day (7546 words) *****

This piece is mad and wonderful. It reminds me a bit of Julio Cortazar's "Blow-Up," another story that seems to get lost in itself--and that in turn loses the reader (or at least this reader)--but that is so much fun to read one doesn't care if clarity is thrown to the wind. This is metafiction on acid, meta to the absurd extreme. At heart is the story of a famous writer writing, writing about his writing, about his friend's writing, or maybe his own writing about a fictional friend, or a fictional protagonist's writing about a real friend, or a fictional protagonist's writing about a fictional friend who is really himself writing about his fictional protagonist? Do you get it?

In between is some nice commentary on writing itself, on a certain kind of writing. There is automatic writing here. There is self-aggrandizing writing (let me quote myself!). There is writing done by assistants. (I'm reminded of some textbook editing experiences, wherein some writers, after giving a basic outline of what was desired, had most of the actual writing done by assistants, who they then rewrote before stamping their name on it.) But the story is so much fun one doesn't have be into writing--just into literature in general. Read it here at Summerset Review.

On "Shoes, Falling" by Melanie Haney (4525 words) ***

If I were to write of binaries here, of opposing principles, yes and no, the lack of any other choices, I'd say something like, "There are two types of people in this world: those who trust, those who don't; those who use lawyers, those who rely on the kindness of others." Reading this, I couldn't help but identify with the mother, with the truster, the one who is hesitant to sue. The story seems to come down on the side of trust as well. But what's interesting is that, while I'm heartened that everything comes out well in the story, and while my own proclivity would be to do just what the mom does, theoretically it seems like the more cynical daughters more often win out. I mean, when you've got neighbors turning against neighbors in places like Iraq and Georgia (the country, that is), people killing or looting others they once ate dinner with, how can one not be? Why do things work sometimes, and why not others? I would like to think that it's just that we're not kind enough to one another. But it takes two to be kind. And knowing whether that's going to be is the hard part. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "The Geometry of Closets" by Marko Fong (2014 words) ***

This story doesn't quite break my heart, but it does provide an interesting glimpse into lives of three supposed misfits. It's a love triangle of a different sort, where the best friend is left to figure out--or simply let be--what appears to be happening, where the best friend is slowly being pushed away by an emerging couple. Or is that just my reading? I've never been to brilliant at figuring out the obvious either, though like the narrator, I often suspect. (I take as an example a time when the sister-in-law of a friend of mine joined a few friends and I at a bar. I kept talking on as if things were just like usual, but brother-in-law suddenly had to leave. One of my friends noted, then, couldn't you see she was crying? Alas, no, I hadn't noticed, so caught up in whatever world I was in. An emotional emergency arises, and I just keep blathering on. I don't know exactly what Asperger's is, but sometimes I feel like I have it. Or maybe I'm just a guy.) Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "An Odd-Looking Catfish" by B. J. Hollars (2083 words) ***

Another odd and fantastic (in more ways than one) story by B. J. Hollars. This one involves a man who finds his daughter after ten years, finds her while fishing one day, inside a boot. Like the best stories of fantastic realism, the weird tale is told as if totally plausible and the weird situation itself becomes a kind of analogy for a lot of what's going on in the story--the loss that the father feels and the inability to understand someone who has changed, who is no longer that person, that friend or kid, you used to know (a loss of a different sort but loss nonetheless). Read the story here at the Summerset Review.

On "Junkyard Dog" by Michael J. Cunningham (8818 words) ****

Cunningham's "Junkyard Dog" falls into that genre of stories about diary writing--or stories that are a diary. I think of Evan S. Connell's novel The Diary of a Rapist and of Rick Moody's short story "The Preliminary Notes" (this latter not exactly a diary, but something akin to it). Both are about who in writing about themselves and their relationships discover something unsavory about themselves--as do the readers. Cunningham takes a similar track, but what makes this story an interesting variation on the genre is that our main character to an extent knows that he's a jerk. And his change at the end--indeed, the change wrought in every single character--suggests that perhaps nothing has changed at all. It seems, unfortunately, so much like many a life. Read the story here at the Summerset Review.