April 2026 | fiction
How to Go Through the Drive-Thru Car Wash Without Your Car
Leave it back home in the driveway: this is your chance to be purified. Approach the drive-thru entrance on foot, like it’s a cathedral of cleanliness. Shift your body into neutral, and get ready for the ride of your life. As you are splashed and soaped and buffed and waxed, exorcise all the dirt that has accumulated in your bones, your skin, your fingernails, your toes. Clean every last surface of your most desirous thoughts: your mind should shine pristinely, all dreams of chocolate cake or tight-sweatered strangers or public figures you wish to strangle safely sequestered in a supply closet at the back of your brain, a place you can’t access without a skeleton key, or two-factor authentication. Ever since you were young, you’ve dreamed of this moment. Ever since you were strapped in the back seat while your mother—harried, hurried—ran your red Volvo wagon through its glow-up shower after retrieving you up from elementary school. You remember watching the show through the cranked-up window, the mops of rubber hair that slopped wet all over the car’s body calming you somehow. Becoming a vehicle wash voyeur also made you think of your excursions to Lion Country Safari, the sadness of that drive-thru zoo; what, you wondered, did these regal but strangely emaciated beasts make of your huge-wheeled and armored animal as it slowly idled through their artificial, exurban habitat? Now, you’re a grown-ass adult pretending to be a Porsche, and paying $19.95 plus tax for this strangest of baptisms—or at least you’re test-driving the idea as reverie. Hand an extra fiver to the guys who finish hand-drying you, and thank them for their efforts. Well: do you feel cleansed? Are you ready to face the horrors and pleasures of this blemished world with fresh-faced and sudsy energy? Or do you desperately want to get dirty again—to go roll around in a puddle of mud somewhere, like the filthy, sinful creature you are?
Matt Leibel
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been previously anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2025, and Best Microfiction 2026. Find him online at mattleibel.com.
April 2026 | fiction
Four-Way Stop
The driver to my right is smiling, gazing at each of us in turn, waving us on. For her, I have no sympathy. But for the one directly across the intersection, a big-eared fellow at least eighty years old, if not closer to eighty-five, who came to a stop before either of us and first had his signal blinking to the right, but now has it blinking to the left, who has inched forward and pumped his brakes at least three times, I feel an overwhelming sense of pity, for within moments I will jam on the gas and swerve around him, honking if necessary, shouting obscenities out my open window, because I am in my forties and overwhelmed with mundane but nagging tasks that await me at work and at home—emails to return, spreadsheets to fill in, bills to pay, plumbers to schedule—boiling over with irritation whenever I’m in a car, having grown up in traffic-choked New Jersey, full of aggressive drivers who’ll cut you off the moment you give them an opening, and now living in mild-mannered Oregon, a place I love for its friendliness and slow pace of life, except when I’m on the road waiting for someone to recognize his obvious right of way. A fourth car approaches from the left, and before it can slow, I’m off.
Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Five Points, and The Best American Short Stories.
April 2026 | fiction
Referred Pain
The fair thing is to tell the ending. He finishes talking. His expression is that of a man who has thrown a bomb and wants to see what happens, but worries he’s miscalculated the blast radius.
How glamorous it might be to throw a drink in his face, though it is the wrong shape of drink for making a point, according to the movies. I try to recall what legally constitutes assault.
What comes to mind instead is a Russian short story I read thirty years ago where the protagonist says, after being let down rough: I stood there, spit upon. I do not in any case throw the drink.
One thing he had liked about me was that I had read (as he put it) “The Russians.” One thing he hated, come to learn, was that I made too many references. We are struggling to reconcile these, my drink and I.
“Well,” I say, not conscious of choosing a last word, a conduit to something impotent. Or perhaps “welp” which is one of only three examples in English of this final “p” that changes a word from a statement into an abdication.
A fair observer could only note the dignity with which I rise then and walk out of the joint like any spurned heroine, now instead a hero, in a doorstop Russian novel that takes place, god knows why, in Texas.
So that’s the last reel. What comes before is the same as any history of amorous imbalance.
Greg Freed
Greg Freed is a psychotherapist living in Austin, Texas. His most recent publication, “Vita Nuova,” in Susurrus Magazine was nominated for this year’s Best Small Fictions. After years of writing utilitarian prose and the occasional opera review, Greg has published flash pieces in Screen Door Review and Libre.
January 2026 | fiction
Ping Pong
The house was a gift—picture perfect weekend luxury on the lake. From their three daughters. They were all doing well, money wasn’t a hurdle, and they wanted to show their parents a good time.
Just relax.
Sit on the dock.
Hold hands, the oldest adds.
They’d become concerned.
In the cathedral-ceiling living room, the fireplace rose in a striking arrangement of natural stone. An island as big as a pickup truck filled the kitchen. Everything was fully stocked. He looks for the coffee maker. She checks for milk. Next a master suite with glass doors to a private deck, the bathroom crowd-sized with walk-in shower, tub with jets, warming towel bars, a heated floor. Upstairs a second-floor balcony overlooks the living room and out to the glittering lake through the two-story window wall. They pause to look without speaking. They stand several inches apart.
More bedrooms, bathrooms, balconies overlooking the lake. Every piece of furniture was hand-crafted, surfaces polished to a finish like clear water. A dream house from some dream life.
* * *
The ping pong table in the walkout basement brings them to a standstill.
She rests her fingers on the scuffed green top. Do you remember?
He crosses to the table. Two paddles with blue rubber-nibbed faces rest on opposite ends of the table, the ball tucked under the nearest.
You used to win, he says, picking up the paddle.
Only at first.
He smiles, shakes his head, remembering. He picks up the paddle wagging it back and forth.
She circles the table. The panorama of the lake is framed in glass doors behind her. She picks up the other paddle.
Lovely hands. Even now, he thinks she has lovely hands.
He picks up the ball, hollow, feeling fragile as a blown egg.
Shall we give it a try?
Now she smiles.
I don’t know if I can—it’s been too long.
He laughs. Very carefully he taps the ball to her. She catches it in her hand and holds it a moment, staring down at it. Then taps it back with equal care. He moves to return it. It goes over his paddle and bounces across the floor.
A little rusty, he says, returning to his side. She moves slightly, shifting foot to foot.
Ready?
As though tapping glass, he serves. Stepping sideways she taps it back. His smile broadens. This time his paddle finds the ball, returns it.
It’s a moment of triumph. Look what they have done! She returns it.
The sound takes on a natural tick tock rhythm.
They focus on keeping the rhythm, the mutual cadence of pass and return. They concentrate, hitting the ball so it is an easy pass for the other to return. Some go wide, and they step quickly reaching out. It is coming back to them.
Serious now, both smiling, almost holding their breath.
It has been so long. So much has come between.
They concentrate.
They keep it going.
Michael Horton
Michael has worked as a bookmobile librarian, McDonald’s shift manager, factory worker in a rubber parts plant, prep cook, men’s dormitory janitor, purchasing agent, and IT guy—but writing is what he does. His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Raleigh Review, among others. Stories were nominated for “Best of the Net” and Pushcart Prize. He is an alumnus of the Sewanee Writers Conference, where he learned from the remarkable Tony Earley and Alice McDermott.
January 2026 | fiction
Perv Circus
The annual Perv Circus celebrated its first decade with a huge bash at the Grand Palace Hotel. Nobody could have brought it off with more panache or bigger profits than Charlie Pinkhaus, known to his entourage as “The Founder.” Charlie knew hundreds of the right sort of people for his Circus: men and women who were loaded with liquid cash; troubled enough to need nearly constant stimulation; and unlikely to blow the whistle on the dark shenanigans he orchestrated, every June, within the private chambers of his own hotel chain’s flagship location. The Grand Palace Hotel was a maze of dark walnut panels twenty-two feet high. Most of the walls were crowded with canvasses, photographs in frames, textiles, tiles, and objects somebody had insisted were art, so they were.
Senators and bankers, writers and high fashion people, actors and sex workers—every sort from every part of the world eventually hit the Perv Circus. One night drew two astronomers and a veterinarian. And lonesome Charlie’s favorite: a recently civilized barbarian.
Jamey Hecht
Jamey Hecht, PhD, PsyD, LMFT, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Brooklyn, NY. His two poetry books to date are Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989-2019 (IPB, 2019). His other three books are about Plato, Sophocles, and Homer. Hecht’s poems, fiction, and scholarship have appeared in two dozen periodicals, including American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, Massachusetts Review, Arion, Rattle, The Pinch, English Literary History, The 16th Century Journal, American Imago, and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. jameyhechtauthor.com
January 2026 | fiction
Waves
The ship wasn’t rocking, still there was a sensation of lilting movement,
of repeated unbalancing and rebalancing,
as she leaned over the railing and reached out to the waves far below.
The instant before he approached, she felt that someone would approach.
He, on the other hand, as he said later, barely knew what was happening, before, during or after.
Their spouses were generally the planners.
Like all their vacations, her husband and his wife had arranged the cruise.
Their spouses didn’t plan this.
The four of them met at horse shoes on the second day, and since then had done much together: dined on huge Scampi, explored overrun harbor towns, laughed sparsely at a comedy show. A continent separated the two couples, but attitude and circumstance made them compatible, and also, as is always the case with compatibility: values. They believed in love and loyalty, and had thought the two as complementary as sea and sky, past and future. On each of their monogamies depended entire infrastructures of children, families, careers, houses, investments, vacations, pets, landscapings, plans.
“Beautiful,” he said as he leant next to her against the railing.
And she knew he meant the evening and the ocean,
the breeze and the sensation of floating far from the tethering land—
but she also knew, or hoped, or knew what was meant by her hoping, that he meant her.
They fell in love.
They fell in love and they loved.
They fell in love and they loved and there seemed to be no choice at all.
Is there ever?
Ten years later, in a hotel in a midwestern city, where they could each stop over occasionally on the way to elsewhere, they were naked together. Even as memory, their nakedness always stunned: a green flash of recognition at sunset or sunrise; a breech from ocean sleep; a perpetual instant of waking. They talked over once and again all their inevitable subjects: commitment, hopelessness, incongruence, boat-rocking. How their infrastructures—teens and young adults, aging parents, retirements, downsizings, dividends, vacations, small mounds interspersed in their landscapes, more plans—continued, and yet they two who supported those infrastructures were infinitely different. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they been these people all along, these awful people, and had just needed each other to learn it.
“It’s time,” she said, and he knew before she said it that she would say it.
She, on the other hand, barely knew what she was saying.
Still, they took other cruises, there were other lilting sensations, sometimes they reached out, or remembered reaching out, or sensed that they would—unbalancing and rebalanced—reach out from their opposite sides of the continent, to the waves.
Kimm Brockett Stammen
Kimm Brockett Stammen’s story collection, In a Country Whose Language I Have Never Mastered, was a finalist for the Iron Horse Book Contest and the 2022 Eludia Award. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, december, CARVE, Pembroke, Prime Number, and over thirty other literary magazines, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart, Best Short Fiction, and Best Microfiction anthologies. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University. kimmbrockettstammen.wordpress.com
