I. Valley of Quest Before what happened to Christine, before arriving in Iraq, before even leaving Nebraska, all we knew for sure is that there would be violence and sand. We began by trying to solve the wrong problem. And although wearing our gas masks in sandstorms was almost certainly the most sensible way to […]

Dr. Maldonado fiddled with the picture of his hot wife and blonde sons, making sure I noticed. Hot professors are rare at Christian universities. They’re mostly Anglican, for some reason. Such a character. I was happy for him. “I’m thinking about grad school,” I said, taking a seat and crossing one leg over the other. […]

Danny Llewellyn hadn’t shit himself since he was a toddler, back when nobody minded. Since then, he’d joined the Army, gone to war, left the Army. He was, by most people’s estimations, a man, especially because his exit from the service had been hastened by injuries sustained in combat. All the pain meds during his […]

The terrorist sat down at the cafe at a quarter to one. She had always been punctual. Beneath her clothing was a bomb improvised from ammonium nitrate. The bomb was uncomfortable. She kept thinking things that didn’t matter, like: ripping off the tape will be painful, or, it’s going to leave red marks on my skin. She […]

The chair came to a stop and with great effort, haltingly, the figure lifted himself to his feet. He took a single jerky step forward onto the stage and the wheelchair receded from view. It was Lypynsky: it couldn’t have been anyone else, though he no longer looked like the man in the poster. His face was gone. There was a general din in the room as people whispered and other people shushed them. I would have been surprised if Lypynsky knew or cared: he had no ears. He wore a skull cap over his waxy, featureless egg head. The hat was the same off-white cotton as the rest of his outfit. He moved across the stage with short staccato steps, favoring his left leg, his ballet shoes scraping the wood as he moved, and when he reached center-stage he turned to face the room. The skin of his face was a shiny mottled camouflage of skintones but missing key features: no eyebrows, one eye completely gone, covered by what must have been a graft, the other eye hooded and searching. His nose was two snakelike slits. Where his upper lip should have been were beautiful tall white teeth that shone under the stage lights.

Every two or three months Jon and Steven would meet  for lunch at the McDonald’s outside the town center where Main Street met Route 1. Jon was married and Steven was single. Steven had been married before, but his wife caught him cheating. Now he was divorced. The divorce had not interrupted their tradition of […]

“Drone up,” said Lieutenant Levi. Heads turned and eyes followed the drone’s swift ascent to the sequoia canopy 350 feet above. It briefly hovered there before slipping out of sight, free of the enclosing redwoods and the damp shadowed ground. “Eyeballs on the treeline,” ordered Captain Sophie Bencker. She stood next to the prisoner in […]

  “You coming to work, New Guy?” Sailor asks, and I snarl at my nickname. Dude gives me the creeps—somehow they stuffed a three-hundred-pound bear who never blinks into a uniform. When the plane landed in Kandahar last night a sergeant with bagpipe lungs paired us off. New blood was teamed with guys who’d been […]

Somewhere near the Hải Vân Pass, Vietnam, 1969 I found her body tangled among a thicket of vines on the jungle floor. Our patrol stopped for the night, and we were digging into our defensive positions when I tripped over her shoeless feet. “Grab your e-tool, Private,” the Sergeant said. “Let’s get her buried before […]

1. A rocket hit the village. I woke up to the sound of the explosion. My eyes widened, I jumped out of bed, put on my bulletproof vest, grabbed my helmet and boots and headed for the door. Another missile hit nearby. The ground shook and the wooden beams of the house creaked. I heard […]

We’d been expecting the fascists for a few days but they’d gotten hung up on Newark. Usually they moved fast. Camden had gone quiet just a week after the government had evacuated from Washington, D.C. to some secret location. Then, abruptly, the fascists flowed south, a growing mob of pickup trucks and tractor trailers bristling […]

I escaped to America after my fiancé, Farhid, died. He was an officer in the Afghan National Army in Bagarm when he was killed by a roadside bomb. His friend Abdul called and told me the news. He and Farhid had attended school together and had joined the army at the same time. Abdul used […]

Alpert Nelsen had lost a toe. He just didn’t know it yet. Not a big toe. One of the smaller ones. It got infected when he kicked a roll of fencing after his cameraman deleted the interview footage. “Can’t you disinfect it?” he asked his doctor, a bearded and bespectacled man working out of a […]

So, Abe, the pleasant guy who buzzes you in every week at the bubbled-roof tennis facility, takes your thick wad of cash (he appreciates exact change) and makes the usual small talk: weather, recent professional tennis matches, how he’s doing fixing up the fixer-upper he just bought in Queens, etc. Lately, you’ve also been discussing […]

It was a typical Thursday night at the Taj Tiki Bar, tucked away off the Jalalabad – Kabul road in the hamlet of Bagrami just outside of the Jbad city limits. The Tiki Bar at the Taj had been established by a UN road building crew from Australia in 2003 and was the only bar […]

From his notebook, illustrated with a picture of a four-eyed flower: We live in a bungalow in Pasadena, California, where my father is a professor of physics at Cal Tech, and my mother is a plein air watercolorist. My mother taught me how to read, and at the age of seven, I was assigned two […]

“You must really like mango.” The girl lifts them, one, two, three, and puts them in the paper bag, but it’s me she is looking at. Sort of. One eye fixes on me and the other eye wanders off to the side as she faces me across La Florcita’s counter from behind jars of sticky […]

I know a deaf man who was once shopping in a general store. A stranger in town was also in the store, and he observed that the deaf man made no movement in response to sounds or voices and hence the stranger discerned he was deaf. The stranger asked the clerk for a pencil and […]

For Sallie. By Picture Day in November, Sophie had perfected the downward stab and counting to twenty. She clenched her soft fingers around her rainbow pony pencil, raised her fist high, and then smashed it down on the practice balloons, barely wincing when they popped, scolding when they escaped. The other children rallied to bounce […]

GoodSouthernBoy™ is born to a RegularAmericanFamily! in Tennessee. You won’t learn where exactly, and if you do, you won’t remember. It’s not important. GoodSouthernBoy™ stands over six feet tall, has blond hair, and you shudder to think that at one point in time, GoodSouthernBoy™ was ConventionallySexuallyAttractive. GoodSouthernBoy™ has the trappings of a nice smile, white […]

An old unsolved murder mystery in a foreign sea-port. Ship Captain the victim, done nobody any harm. Who killed Captain S. Palori and why? Why was Palori’s mission kept quiet from the populace of the island country that received his cargo three full years? This was the further and larger question, one ultimately of State […]

The Pretzelman died yesterday. He was shot on his corner half a block from his home, and if he has family they’ll pile stuffed animals, and one of his boys will spray-paint RIP, and someone will take his corner. Old ladies will sometimes mention him, but that will die out as well, and the neighborhood’s […]

Thank you Thank you for your service Thank you for going Thank you for coming back Thank you for not dying Thank you for taking the bullet, the mortar round, the shrapnel that is making its way to your heart by micromillimeters every year Thank you for eating that god-awful food gritted with sand so […]

  I fill the big bucket with soap and water and start heading across the field. It’s early on a Sunday and Gran Flower will want his solar cells cleaned, which they say isn’t really necessary, but Gran insists it helps. So I have woken up early and am hoping to reach Gran before he […]

  I know what you’re thinking. What could this story possibly be about. Let me catch you up. First of all, you’re wondering whether I shot Angela’s kid or Angela. The answer is: I shot neither. I shot a jihadist who spotted me. The next half hour was a blur of sniping, shooting, and explosions. […]

She came from the south, wearing a bright red dress and carrying a light blue backpack, weaving through the well-worn paths on the banks of the Euphrates that had been carved out by foot traffic and various other forces of erosion for millennia. The same ground carried her ancestors and bequeathed them their fertile crescent, […]

Sadie was a do-gooder, someone who was aware of the deeply rooted systematic injustices that perpetuated oppression throughout the world, and who wanted to do something meaningful about it. She was a liberal cliché and she knew it. Sadie found it interesting how drugs caused the woman who lived behind the grocery store to give […]

He remembered that day. God, did he remember it! His worst day in a year of worst days, a day he’d spent the last six months trying to bury. A day he’d regret for a lifetime, even though he himself had done nothing to regret. Roger White sat on the unscreened porch of sister’s house […]

They sent us home from school early because of the snow, just hard little flakes at first. I didn’t look in the garage for Dave’s car because it was the time when he’d be at work. I went into the room he shares with my mother, took a five from the pile of change and […]

When visiting a friend’s grandpa, the Boy learned that the grandpa liked watching football games on the weekends instead of the black and white western movies. His favorite football team was the Kansas City Chiefs. Their team colors were—red, white, and yellow. Some of the fans had feathers on their head and they chanted and […]

Vietnam, 1969 The world appeared like a ripple in a puddle- a Jell-O jiggle spreading across dark green jungle water. The scene came together but would not hold still. Caleb did not know where he was. His vision swirled, and his chest hurt, and his lungs seemed full of water. His hand searched for his […]

I am in the grand room of the High Commissioner’s Residence in Manila. A crystalchandelier hangs from the ceiling, intact. Not even one crystal looks to be missing. The building itself didn’t escape the war. I saw the damage as the car approached. The right wing must have been bombed. Blackened walls. Blown out windows. […]

I can still see his smile as I settle into my desk and the normal morning wave shuffles in. First comes the pinstripes of the best and the brightest, carrying their expertise and experience like an expensive briefcase by their side, letting it swing around for all to see. They speak of exotic and noteworthy […]

My eagerness propelled me up the airplane steps. Eleven years to the day. Well, technically eleven years and a day. We assembled for the meandering trip to Afghanistan on September 11, 2012 but didn’t take off until September 12. Close enough. I was finally on my way to join the fight. The takeoff forced me […]

Where mom and dad and me used to live in the Haight, from the brush in the empty lot across his street, with a BB gun, I shot a big, scary German Shepherd guard dog –  right in his gonats.  Wasn’t my gun. Was a big-kids’ dare. The oldest one told me, “You’re just a […]

Krieger’s father left Salzburg late in life. He had never married and had no close family to speak of. After thirty years a banker, he yearned for something else. A friend in the Austrian foreign ministry proposed that he try Siam. The consulate in Bangkok could use a man with his keen mind, he said, […]

2022 Veterans Motorcycle Manual

Lee Harkness was supposed to meet this guy Smitty at a bar called Marty’s on 14th Street at a specified time. Lee was late because it was his first time in Dallas. He had trouble finding the address. “You’re late,” said Smitty. “No shit,” said Lee. “Relax, have a drink.” The guy backed right off, […]

Note: M.C. Armstrong’s new novel, ‘American Delphi,’ will be out October 15, 2022 from Milspeak Books. It has been hailed as “riveting, wise, and wonderful.” Please feel free to pre-order here, or purchase wherever books are sold. — From ‘American Delphi’ by M.C. Armstrong   “How do you tell the world that your brother is […]

The Bureau for the Mitigation of Human Anxiety They were the survivors, they should have been happy, they should have been fucking thrilled (the President accidentally blurted that on a hot mic few years back, everyone quoted it until it was not even that funny anymore, but that’s what she’d said, throwing up her hands: […]

Gideon, a senior majoring in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz, fidgeted nervously. He wanted to write a senior thesis that could be turned into a podcast or miniseries. He had researched the criminal conviction of Moses West. West was imprisoned for murder. It wasn’t hard to connect his arresting officer to a […]

Viraj sat in a room behind the motel reception counter, eating a bowl of bhaat with his fingers when the desk bell chimed. He set the bowl down and opened the door. A man in a heavy green coat stood at the counter. His pale blue jeans hung off his waist and he tugged them […]

May 3, 2009 After Captain Short returned from his training with the Australians, he scheduled himself to take leave the following week, which meant he’d be gone all of May. While I waited for him to go, I didn’t do shit except play Axis and Allies with the guys and cook for everyone. Until this […]

Johnny felt the oak floor tilt sharply below him. He had no idea what was happening or why, and he was frightened. The tilt was steep, so steep that he felt himself sliding, then falling. He wanted to cry, but he was so terrified that he couldn’t make a sound. Suddenly he fell right off […]

Since getting back from deployment, Frank had gone soft. He was still a massive block of muscle, but the edges had rounded. Too much time off. Too much food and booze. He saw it in his reflection of the Vegas penthouse suite window that overlaid the view of the pre-dawn casino lights that blighted out […]

Okay—let me set the record straight. It started as a bunch of rumors first, before we lost control of it. But it really started as a stupid word game at a mission briefing. “Your porn name!” LT began. “Pet’s name and the street you grew up on.” He was keen on figuring out everyone’s combination. […]

I drum the steering wheel of the rental car with the flats of my palms. It’s the opening riff of a song by Yaz. It takes three notes, four—that blossoming into a fanfare of electronic horns, and I’m a teenager in the 80s driving these same roads in Ingrid’s crap Toyota, bellowing along. “Don’t make […]

Just about every afternoon the wind came up suddenly, stirring the dust that blew through the screens of our company’s orderly room. “Get moving, Gorski,” the First Sergeant commanded. “Got it, Top.” I jumped up from my desk and ran outside. Metal awnings protected each of the screened openings into our building from Vietnam’s roasting […]

Death had narrowed his search of potential candidates down to two soldiers, both with high kill counts. Qualified applicants were always military men assigned to the line. Death had been a knight under Robert the Pious. His predecessor had been a Centurion under Augustus. Snipers, artillerymen, and pilots were ineligible, too much separation from the […]

Author’s note: I arrived at this story after reading an article in Rolling Stone called ‘Highway to Hell: A Trip Down Afghanistan’s Deadliest Road’ and I thought, what if what’s happening in Afghanistan ended up happening here, in America? Would Americans finally “get it” then? * Sometimes the weariness in my bones was so bad […]

Holding Dick Cheney’s shotgun is not exactly how I thought I’d be spending my time when I joined the Marines. It was summer of ’06 and the meatgrinder of Iraq was going full-tilt.  President Bush had gathered all his advisors and generals and a host of other ne’er-do-wells at Camp David to come up with […]

I met the Lieutenant at a diplomatic reception at our embassy. Carrying papers which issued weaponry to his nation’s military, I passed them to my contact – a pock-marked General whose eyes glittered when he seized them. Having done my duty as military attaché, I grabbed a drink and contemplated my exit. That is, until […]

CONTENT WARNING: A hate crime against an Arab-American is committed in the story. Being an Arab-American myself, the hate crime is loosely based on something that occurred to me back in 2004 when I worked as a raft guide in a southern state.   It’s past two in the morning, and it is warm on […]

Sometimes these things happen. You wake from a deep sleep, whether a short afternoon nap or a long night’s slumber, and you’re disoriented. You forget things. Sometimes you shower and dress for work and only after breakfast realize it’s Saturday. Sometimes you stare unfamiliarly around the room you’ve lived in for years and wonder where […]

Noor and his wife Damsa moved to Paris when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Twenty-two years later, after the collapse of the Taliban, they returned to Kabul and rented a house with a large backyard in District Ten on Taimani Street. Withered red, blue and white roses grew beside a bare concrete wall and […]

1. Her Friend the Israeli (Eli) Mais got a phone call from her parents in the occupied territories of the West Bank. I don’t know what they told her yet; she’s been too shaken to tell me. All she told me is that I needed to book her a ticket to Palestine. She wants to […]

Stautner wasn’t my friend anymore. He didn’t get promoted with the rest of us on the first of the month. Now a fire burned between us. Stautner was a shitbag. Everyone knew it. He was a shitbag and we weren’t. For this reason, it was his job to burn the day’s garbage in a trash […]

We buried Javid on a gloomy Friday morning in late December, shortly before Ali was gassed on the battlefront. All the guys from the eleventh grade attended the funeral, most of the teachers too. Later that day at the mosque, Javid’s dad, a well-groomed, bearded, middle-aged man who sold rosaries and prayer stones to pilgrims, […]

Five days ago at morning PT, Nate wasn’t in formation. Everyone assumed he was at sick call, and we did our workout without him. But when he didn’t show up for first formation after breakfast, tensions rose. He hadn’t checked in at sick call, he wasn’t assigned to any special details, and his roommate Specialist […]

  Sergeant Reiss insisted on giving a full patrol order every time we left the wire. I thought it was overkill, but I didn’t mind as much as some of the other guys. Haggerty especially was always going on about how it was a waste of time. It’s not like there was anything else to […]

It’s zero-three hundred and I’m yanked out of a sleep so deep I wake thrashing and fighting like a marlin at the end of a hook. It takes me a minute to figure out why. Then the sounds of raw, unrestrained sex slap me further awake. The anger flashes immediately but I try to reign […]

The hermit lived in the water tower with an alligator, both of them long-gone paler than moon. Their eyes gemmed the same pink in front of a flashlight. The hermit’s skin was scaly with scabs. His gums were too big for his lips to close over them. Some speculated that these traits were adaptive, or […]

This is the memory that stays with him as his blood abandons the body and life fades—this, the one comfort that will carry him into the next life. Dawran had waited beneath a mulberry tree in May of last year. He’d come to love mulberries in a small way—they’d always kept him company through the […]

If you’ve never seen a desert, I mean, a real desert, you’d think the sand looks like murky brown water rippling in the wind. Sometimes I would tell myself that, as I traversed the barren land of sand and dunes. I wandered the desert for so long, my face was wrinkled around the eyes from […]

After four months of not getting shot, not stepping on a mine, not taking a fragment to the neck or through the eye, Pat Dolan didn’t think about his remaining time in country. At the firebase, men talked about it constantly, as if would improve their odds. He never bothered. He had arrived on a […]

Grant crouched on the sandstone and leaned on his fishing pole. The sun warmed his shoulders as he stared through the clear, green water of the Sand Fork River. Shadows of particles on the water’s surface glided across the submerged, algae-covered rocks. A dragonfly buzzed over the water. There were no fish in the pool. […]

There were sixteen of us before the storm hit: truants and runaways and young offenders, girls in insulated yellow snowsuits, left to the dark Montana cold. We marched like ants across the tree line. We were terrifying and tiny and gone. Above us, icicles swayed from conifers, threatening to crush us alongside the mountain passage’s […]

On a bright December morning, the lieutenant told me the news. An insurgent group in Latifiyah had executed about twenty Iraqi Shiites. Their unburied bodies were still rotting in the desert. We had to do something. We had to help. That’s what he said. “What kind of fucked up bullshit do you have us doing […]

This isn’t the first time that man has visited this cemetery, and he supposes it isn’t going to be the last. As a child he was one of the pack of kids from the neighboring sprawl of houses who came here, against all warnings, to scare themselves silly with games of Ghost or Hide-and-Seek or […]

1. Heads Years later, long after the bodies had been pieced back together, after they’d been bagged and buried, after the lawyers got involved and Code Pink rallied, after the stacks of cash and the nightmares that finally ended, he would still want that one simple thing. The same thing he’d been after that first […]

So Senior Reyes, the new night shift sup. I see him and the new airman walking around the hangar bay. Just talking. Honestly, I thought they were working and I’ve got my binder with me so I come up behind them and go, hey Senior, can you sign off my qual? He whips around and […]

Three Pieces of Flash Fiction Things That Stood Out There was a boy in Izard. A brave boy. Everyone knew him. Ricky Dunkle. The Dunkles were quiet people. They lived across from the school in a little blue house. The kind of blue house that made people shake their heads and mutter. Mrs. Dunkle raised […]

In Atlanta at the Ritz Carlton we stopped at the bar by the lobby on our way upstairs. Fred saw Newt Gingrich who was dressed neat casual wearing loafers (I don’t know what a loafer is but that’s what he was wearing). His wife, Callista, was in the corner talking on a razor cell phone. […]

“Been to Las Vegas? Clean. Corporate. Sleek, serious suit. We’re that guy’s kid brother selling Adderall in the parking lot.” That’s a line I use at cocktail parties and readings and the like. Book people – literary people, apologies – tend not to be New York natives (quibble away, literary people) so a natural social […]

An homage to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (The New Yorker, June 1978). Wake up at oh-my-god-o’clock on Monday and run six miles; run another six miles at the same time Tuesday through Friday; to get night vision, keep one eye closed in a well-lit area and then open it in darkness; always field strip a MRE […]

The Staff Sergeant shifted in his tight, class-A uniform and frowned. Phones rang and keyboards, the primary weapon of administrative Marines, clicked in the busy Personnel Support Detachment office. I said please a lot even though, if I hadn’t lost my eye, I’d never beg a guy like that for a thing. “Please, Staff Sar’nt. […]

“What do you think?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Could be an ambush.” “Could be.” “But here? The corps is miles back.” “Looks like it broke down.” It was true. Steam trailed through the windows in the engine. Driggs could see the shimmer of heat from the stack all this way off without […]

He had one scar when I met him, a single blow to the back of his neck in the soft fleshy space between head gear and body armor. He liked to say, I’ll tell you this for free. I’d move in close and listen. His voice was a lyric tenor. A murmur, a whisper, sometimes […]

We were the HMDs: the human mine detectors. In a sense the job was easy, but impossible to do well. There was no good method, for example, by which to differentiate animal carcasses packed with high explosives from those concealing only bloat and maggots. If roadkill was sighted, rather than stop to investigate, one of […]

That evening, at half past nine To William, the question of his mother is clear. The question of his father is more complicated, because there is Peter. The night that they meet, William is about seven years old and his mother has brought him to one of Peter’s exhibits. She hasn’t said much to her […]

A nuclear reactor is nothing more than a glorified water heater. Sailors as young as nineteen, kids, bombard uranium atoms with neutrons until the binding energy of the atom is no longer able to hold it together. When it finally rips at the seams, it throws energy: heat, kinetically agitated neutrons, which strike more atoms […]

These days they call me by name: Hope. By “they,” I mean the people in our small dusty town, Masaka, where everyone knows everyone. When I was a little girl living with my grandmother, all I wanted was to be known by my name, but no, they’d call me Little Girl. I’d be on my […]

The first time I met you I fought your father in the driveway. He fisted a tire iron, but he’d been drinking and he only clipped my forearm with his looping swing. That’s really where my scar comes from. The afternoon had been nice, your mother made kabobs, but you wouldn’t touch the green peppers, […]

I got off the bus and a woman kept pace. Skinny black jeans with a fat silver belt of keys. “I know how you feel.” “I feel fine.” I was lost. I asked her for directions. She took out a red inhaler, took a puff and told me where to go, in gulps. It was […]

The following short story is based on the myth “Ceyx and Alceone,” as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cy busied himself with the by–now routine activities of a combat patrol: gathering his personal gear and stowing it in the truck, drawing the big .50 caliber machine gun and mounting it in the gun turret, setting the […]

The following excerpt of The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe is reprinted with permission by A.A. Knopf. When I was eleven years old, I moved in with my aunt after my mother was sent to prison. That was 2004, which was incidentally the same year the pictures of Abu Ghraib were published, the same year […]

In high school, I was invisible–acne and braces, last year’s wardrobe. I didn’t have close friends. My grades weren’t going to win me any scholarships. The football coach offered me the equipment manager’s position after tryouts. In the ninth grade, 9/11 happened. In tenth grade, I watched the Air Force drop daisy cutters on Tora […]

Reprinted with permission from Atria Books. Mia Tucker woke before the alarm. She usually did on weekdays. She was a person of routine and that’s what routine did. Sleep whispered like a lullaby through the black morning but she pushed it away, sitting up in bed to put her mind in order. If she’d been […]

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Taylor Brown’s newest novel, Pride of Eden, out March 17th, 2020. Reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Press. Lope knelt before the fire engine, rag in hand, polishing the silver platters of the wheels. An old song rose in his throat. Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, […]

This is how the fight happened: earlier that morning, while waiting on reveille to bugle from the loudspeakers across the blacktop, Harvey forced it on the new kid, Private Gilmore, as the rest of us watched, some gruff comment about his curly, black ponytail—the barbers hadn’t shaved him yet. Only two days into OSUT, Ft. […]

An hour before the drive, Bubs finds himself sucking down an edible. A big blowout blowtorched dab of a brownie. He could feel it stonerizing his insides the second the swallow went down, that ashy grass-stained aftertaste staking a claim on his tongue Been doing a lot of things like that, lately. Ill-advised things. Bubs’ […]

Captain Alex Athens had been the undisputed master of PowerPoint storyboards within the brigade headquarters since the unit’s arrival in Afghanistan. No order was disseminated until he had compressed it into a carefully orchestrated one-slide tapestry of photos, maps, graphic symbols, and textual data that prescribed every detail of an upcoming mission from intelligence to […]

Excerpted from A DOOR IN THE EARTH Copyright © 2019 by Amy Waldman. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved. From Chapter Four: The Distant Fire On her third night, Parveen stayed in the main room with Waheed and Jamshid after dinner while the women and girls went to […]

“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” -The Gospel of John One day you’re a teenage girl in the arms of Fidel Castro and you’re carrying the Christ child of the Christless revolution and you’re thinking this man needs a filling between his front teeth and then he will be […]

“So, you feel the earth rotating under your feet?” As Specialist Torres grasped tightly to the doorframe of the CO’s office, a litany of questions flashed before Captain Savalas’ mind, least of which involved the earth’s gravitational pull. “Yes, sir.” “That’s why you’re holding onto my doorframe?” Torres struggled to keep his feet from slipping […]

Excerpted from the collection Black Coffee by Daniel Ford, September Sky Press, June 2019.   “Are we ever going to leave this bed?” “God, I hope not.” “We have to at least attempt to do something today.” “I’d argue that we’ve done plenty already.” “I mean real things.” “That all seemed pretty real to me. […]

  I. Under a ceiling topped by swirling fans and surrounded by walls whose windows had no glass, the Private lay on the bed like a slab of stone as hands went about the routine tasks that evidenced that, despite all probability, he was still alive, even if no longer whole. The hands stuck a […]

The shine and swagger of a new day. Great Recession? Not Hous­ton. And yet, and yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been assessed and corrected; and now the city of Brock Wharton seceded further from the rest of the flatlined coun­try in the first week of September […]

For the amputees of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Segways were the new fad. It had become common to see roving gangs of them, upright and speeding across campus and through the hospital, riding in elevators and waiting in line at the cafeteria or pharmacy, causing a flurry of complaints from doctors and staff. And when […]

No more than 10 percent of the United States military was special operations when I got out. Being in special operations or “specops” as it was known at the time was something to be proud of. There were Rangers and Special Forces and Marine Special Operations and Force Recon and the SEALs like me, and […]

August 2011 I remember when you first joined, I used to tell you that the Army would be four years, the way that college had been four years, and that really used to help you. These days, I’m not so sure. You called me this morning on my way out the door. You know the […]

  It was not rare to see horses on Main Street when I was growing up in this town. I was spindly and spry then, when distances were calculated by how much jerky and water to pack, when the idea of pocket-sized computers was still the realm of science-fiction, the same stuff as teleportation devices […]

A handsome couple strolled arm in arm down Central Park West. The man, tall and athletic with a thick, well-brushed mane, wore a black, fur-trimmed cloak over an Armani smoking jacket. The lady, slim but curvy with lustrous blonde hair done in a complicated braid, wore white mink over a low-cut black Prada gown. Though […]

The morning of day three, Kelly decided to go out on a jet ski. She’d been resistant at first for all the usual reasons. But the accumulated effect of watching other vacationers roar around on the water, the insanely beautiful tropical backdrop, and listening to Dan complain about her unwillingness to try new things finally […]

When I was a child, and my father had just begun to be noticeably strange, my mother took me to the zoo. It was July, and hot. The lions were thin, their manes as brittle as straw. Monkeys tumbled in a canopy of ropes, pausing to pick at each other’s hair. They ignored us. The […]

The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Orth-Veillon’s work-in-progress, The Storage Room. Here, she intersperses real letters from her grandfather (italicized), an American soldier who fought at the Battle of the Bulge, with her own imagined accounts of the stories behind the letters. The Battle of the Bulge, which ended 74 years ago on January […]

I went home to Jersey only once since the enlistment. I had to see my Ma. Back in the summer of 2011 I finished Basic and Advanced Individual Training for Cav Scouts and thought I’d officially become a real patriot now. The son of Filipino immigrants transformed into a proud, government-paid U.S. Soldier. A real […]

Too often your mind wanders back to those places where God has turned his face away. For example: the prison your platoon guarded in Baghdad in the early months of the war. Displaced Iraqi families were making new homes under the comforting shadows of your machine guns and you kicked soccer balls around the dusty […]

Jean, not Jean by Matthew J. Hefti   When I look in the mirror, I think I look stupid. Otherwise, I don’t even think of how I look. But when I do look in the mirror, it’s like I can’t look away. Also when I do, I pick a lot. Today is especially bad. My […]

Camp TUTO, Greenland 1960 When Paul, a nuclear operator, had arrived in Greenland, the reactor at Camp Century was still not fully assembled, so he and a dozen other men were being held temporarily at another camp a hundred miles south. Everything he could see on the edge of the polar ice cap was white […]

Editor’s Note: “Into the Tunnel” is the first chapter of Patrick Hicks’s new novel, ECLIPSE. “The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.”  —Wernher von Braun He was tired and cold when they arrived […]

Well, nothing at first, not right after. In those initial moments panic is still optional. At the grocery store, the one across from your building on Frederick Douglass, or farther up on Ft. Washington near your boyfriend’s place, depending—a shrill, unfamiliar tone piercing the Muzak. It startles awake a sudden bond between you and other […]

My arm burned red resting out the window in the summer sun as I drove east out of the mountains. I passed through the shade of centuries-deep bluffs carved by the Yellowstone River, then curved south into open, tall-grass prairies. A road sign for Little Bighorn Battlefield flashed by with its mileage—more than once a […]

An excerpt from the novel Strawberry Fields. Alice, a reporter, and the detective Modigliani are both working on the case of five murdered veterans of the Iraq War (including Kareem, named below). The investigation has extended in many directions, including toward the private military contractor Xenith, with whom the victims were involved.   Alice   […]

I. Esses The warmth of his voice makes us wary of his intentions. He bears our sin of greenness like a precious burden, our softness like a direct order from God to transform us in his image. A helmet fits his skull like the mold from which it was cast. When he removes it his […]

A bare bulb in a hooded fixture illuminated the sign. Fog obscured the wooden placard, and as Joseph neared it, the black lettering seemed to recede into the white plywood. It read: WEST CALLAHAN CREEK POPULATION 1,187 EST. 1866 CITY LIMITS VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED Prosecuted for what? Joseph Hunter walked his bicycle along the […]

We had a dry spell in Logar. It was December and the weather was dog shit, so a degree of slowness was expected. But this went beyond slowness. It was like peace had broken out and nobody’d told us. Nights we’d meet in the ops hut for the mission brief. We’d tune the flat screens to […]

STORM The wolves are restless this morning. Pacing the woods, huffing and murmuring. It’s not that they’re hungry; Rin fed them each four squirrels. No, it’s a clenching in the sky like a gathering fist. The wet heat pushing in on her temples. Juney feels it, too, her head swaying, fingers splayed. She is sitting […]

There was the stone pagoda, three-tiered, built on a small hill over a stream that shone like pebbled glass. The platoon had dammed a pool in the stream. They crouched in their skivvies, soaping and scrubbing the August grit from the creases and crannies of their bodies. Howitzers were perched on the hills around them, […]

The veterans of the Standard had been back from their wars for some time, trying to figure out how to live lives in the face of newfound civilian freedoms. No one barking orders but their girlfriends, wives, and mothers. Fuck them. The vets could do anything they wanted anytime—they were Americans in America—though what they […]

There are many moving parts in a gun. There’s the trigger, which most people mistakenly believe is what fires the whole thing. This is understandable. The trigger is elegant and shapely and romantic. Simple. Easy to comprehend. But, the trigger is just the instigator. It compresses a spring, slowly (or quickly) building up enough energy […]

An excerpt of the debut novel Sid Sanford Lives! by Daniel Ford Sid stepped into the desert surrounding the cramped forward operating base just as the sun surged over the distant mountaintop. He scratched his patchy, three-day-old beard. He inhaled deeply, the already warming air singeing his raw nostrils. The sand didn’t crunch so much as slither […]

“Excerpted from BRAVE DEEDS © 2017 by David Abrams. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.” We walk, we walk, we walk. We head into the fireball sun, packed in battle armor, baking from the inside out, throats coated with dust, hearts like parade drums, adrenaline spiking […]

  I miss the fragrance of Polish women. I have not encountered anything quite like it. This tender unwashed grassy odor. Part stench, part hymn, evoking mysteries, bygone days, some kind of particle enigma. American women smell of chemical flowers. False lavender, concocted rose. In the hallway of the row house, my cousin’s wife leaves […]

The following is an excerpt from Still Come Home, Katey’s novel set in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, it wasn’t the Taliban fighters’ movements that gave them away to Rahim, but their laughter, little jabs of sound punching through the packed heat. Rahim looked up and saw them traversing the slopes above the road. They moved […]

Author’s note: I began this story in 2013, but eventually set it aside because I feared it would seem unrealistic, or possibly even quaint, to write a story about a Facebook group formed to exploit female service members. This past year, for obvious reasons, I dug it up again. * Green cornstalks rolled into the […]

The YouTube walkthroughs have names, like action movies or episodes of a serial TV show. Judgment Day. Suffer With Me. Fallen Angel. Old Wounds. If you were playing, you’d fire up your console, scroll through the list, pick your game, and go. But Tracey Knox doesn’t play. She’s only here to watch. One quick click […]

What I really want to say, Alma, is how Remy looked on the beach that first night, his teeth perfect in the glow of the phosphorescent kelp, but I can’t tell him that right now, and maybe after this week, not ever. This past spring, before him, I spent every Saturday morning running the ridgeline […]

The sousetrap north of the courthouse is one of those expensive, contrived places doing its best to look like a dive—sawdust on the floor, animal pelts on the walls, microbrews on tap—and its patrons have the long-suffering air of parolees waiting out a sentence. Ingrid, the bartender, is a waifish hipster with an obvious piercing […]

Across the eight-lane roadway from the observation post was a gas station where Iraqis waited for days, siblings and cousins trading shifts and standing guard, eyeing the other clans and tribes. Pierstein crouched behind a chest-high wall of dusty sandbags and hugged the shade it created just outside the post’s front entrance, a long piece […]