On "Fortune" by Christine Sneed (4347 words) ***

Sneed's "Fortune" is an indictment of material desire, a theme that runs throughout many of her stories. It's also about not just fortune as riches but fortune as one's future. In it, a so-called Mr. Potter decides to take up fortune telling to make a little extra money in order to purchase things for his girlfriend. Things don't turn out quite as he expected. Read the story here at StorySouth.

On "The Queen of Swords" by Jen Michalski (4932 words) ***

Sometimes it's all in the ending, and in the symbols and metaphors. I like how this story works with broken things, looking at them from several different angles--broken dishes, broken relationships, broken businesses, broken lives. Still, where the story really caught me was in the last line. Read it here (and don't skip ahead) at StorySouth.

On "Johnny Cash Beset by Darkness" by John Marshall Daniel (3918 words) ***

You know a story is doing something right when only half the page will load. What I mean is that my computer failed to download the entire story the first several times I tried to read it. Why does that mean something with the story is working? Because I read the first half and was desperate to read the end. Glad I got there, eventually.

Circus stories are rather fascinating--to me at least. I'm not sure why. I mean, offer me the opportunity to go to a circus, and I doubt you'd see me pulling out my wallet. Maybe it's just the thrill of returning to childhood that makes me like such stories, the thrill of returning to a time when circuses were interesting. Or maybe it's the freak nature of the business and the constant road life that intrigues, and finding out the lives behind the circus is my way of being in a circus myself, albeit vicariously. I think it is probably this latter prospect. The open road no longer holds that same fascination as it did when I was twenty, but down deep, maybe, it still does--you just have to dress it up as circus fiction.

"Trip across the country, man?" "Nah." "How about in a clown suit?" "Hmmm . . . Okay--I'm there."

Read the story here at StorySouth.

On "Family Five and Dime" by P. J. Woodside (2407 words) ****

Some of the best parts of the movie The Good Girl occur in the five and dime that Jennifer Aniston's character works in. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the horrid and desperately depressing store, but those scenes remind me a bit of the location of this story. I think of some cheap ripoff of Pic N'Save, some place where only the poorest people in the community go, on the wrong side of town, where shopping ceased in 1962. Put a couple of employees in the mix, and you have the makings for a story of lives that have petered out. Like Aniston's character, one of them seems bound to try something different--if only she can, if only she is allowed. Unlike The Good Girl, however, this story is set down South, where community standards come into play. It isn't just the hopelessness of the character's surroundings but the will of the community that characters don't try to do anything to change their situation, don't do anything that might upset anyone. Will the narrator conform? Read the story here at StorySouth.

On "Creative Memories" by Brigitte N. McCray (3746 words) ***

This story does a good job of working a celebrity into the plot without really working a celebrity in. The title says much about what the piece is about, working on several levels, the father with Alzheimer's, the son's memories of his past, the scrapbook collectors, the boyfriend's own doubtful past. How much about ourselves do we make up? How much is anything real? In asking such questions, I can't help but be drawn back to Oscar Zeta Acosta's book, which I just finished rereading. Read the story here.