Excerpts:

Ingrid Hill
Pavilion
A tent maker has just completed a job for the army, the construction of several officers' tents for field maneuvers. He is carrying brown canvas, a color just a little too rich, a little too beautiful, for the army. But dye lots are irregular. What can one do?

Jennifer Anne Moses
Duty Free
He remembered a time when he was maybe eleven or twelve when he'd suddenly been seized by the conviction that he was going to die, and soon, too.

Horatio Potter
Summer Help
Hiram wondered if these infestations and the twisting of weather were somehow connected to the newcomers, the sweeping in of unknown people filling the once wide-open spaces with the many things they owned--SUVs and four-door pickups, camper trailers, ATVs, motorbikes, horse trailers, trout boats, canoes--the entirety of leisure retail splendor.

Christine Sneed
Twelve + Twelve
Someone in the alley three stories below my window was calling out to someone else, and what he was saying was not very nice. Maybe he did it because we were all stuck in an ugly, listless March, ice visible everywhere and clinging to our lawns like a dense gray scum.

Matthew Salesses
The Grief Ministry
Pages of grief ministry research were spread out on the floor around me, near Sue Ellen's bed. I was asking God to help me be a better first responder.

Noa Jones
Brother Ron
He was a steady man, meaty but refined, carrying his large frame with delicacy. Fish bones in pudding.

Nam Le
Interview by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais
I don't want any of my stories to be a proof of me getting a place right. That's not what the stories are about. But neither do I want to give any well-meaning reader the opportunity to be jolted out of their suspension because I didn't get the place right.

Judy Troy
Cactus
On the third night his symptoms returned; he stopped breathing, and Beverly resuscitated him, which she wouldn't have had she been able to see the remaining eight months of his life. But she hadn't been able to see.

Randolph Thomas
According to Foxfire
The hogs had been nosing the trough, expecting breakfast, when we walked up. My uncle was right behind my father, and the hogs seemed to sense the men were up to no good.

Carmiel Banasky
Dinner in Diaspora
"We didn't light the candles." "We drank wine," Savi laughed. "We didn't say the prayers." "We'll do it next week, Ava. Don't worry."

Pamela Sutton
Tamer of Horses
Nothing in Philadelphia is plumb: the sidewalks; the doorjambs; the floors; the windows; the trim; the walls; the ceilings, which go a different way from the roofs; the chimneys; and the corkscrew staircases holding everything together. If you twirl up and down those stairs enough times for enough years you forget where you came from and can't recall where you're going.

Charles McCarry
Interview by Kevin Rabalais
I suppose I'm old enough now to admit this: My fiction is in some ways an attempt to explain my life to myself. I'm not Christopher and Christopher is not me, but we did a lot of the same things.