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Beyond the Frame

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Timothy Loftus

Sometime around 1912, twenty-two-year-old Great Aunt Annie took a photo of Mayme and Beth, two of her younger sisters, standing on opposite sides of an unnamed friend. They were all eating apples at the same time. Annie framed the scene with her camera then snapped the photo, capturing their impish goofiness on black-and-white film. The smiles hidden by the apples show in their eyes.
Ninety years later, in February 2002, I was hiking with my three daughters,

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Into the Flooded Field

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Brandon Daily

The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared.
It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth.

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Why Is It So Hard?

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Marie Chen

These few days, the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has become the center of attention of the media, and the talking points extend to the injustice of America’s private insurance system introduced to patients. I am staying in Taiwan now since September and have gone through the healthcare treatment many times for my injured knee and chronic problem of Spondylolisthesis. I would like to talk about my own experience enjoying a healthcare system that’s totally different from America’s.

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Threadbare

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Dharmini Saravanan

Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

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Though Some Have Changed

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Jon Shorr

The 2024 presidential election’s over: I’m starting to sleep better again; my blood pressure is returning to normal. It didn’t surprise me that Donald Trump won the election; it just appalled me.
It didn’t surprise me that during the campaign, Trump supporters saw those of us that opposed his election to president as the enemy; nor did it surprise me that we saw Trump supporters as stupid, naïve pawns.
It did surprise me, though, to learn that my girlfriend was the enemy.

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Local Clown

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Kevin Yeoman

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

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The Dream Netters

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Emily Larkin

I’ve always been afraid of the dark.
It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

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The Poseur

In Issue 92, February 2025 by Michael "Tuna" Coley

A generation of kids wanders into a DIY venue and gets their fill of drugs relevant to their generation and locale. Blues, speed, blow in Denver it’s cheap grass. And the ever-present booze. Piles and piles of discarded PBR, Miller High Life, and Rolling Rock cans with a few of the well-off kids’ craft beers thrown in for good measure. An aluminum salvager’s wet dream.

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The White Blouse

In Issue 91, January 2025 by Kendall Klym

Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.

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A Life Made of Words

In Issue 91, January 2025 by T. G. Metcalf

To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

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Reckoning

In Issue 91, January 2025 by Suzanne Zipperer

David Harris stood at the front of a group of about fifty protesters gathered in a church parking lot just east of a strip of I-43 designated as Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson Memorial Highway just north of downtown Milwaukee. He was closely listening to the instructions being given by a young woman wearing a black T-shirt with I Can’t Breathe printed in large, white, block letters across the chest.

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Whispers of the Beloved

In Issue 91, January 2025 by Toni Palombi

Nestled in the Adelaide Hills, Father John’s home is warm and inviting. Outside, the trees are dampened by the winter rains. The sky is dark although it is only midday. John sits in a blue armchair by the heater. Green plants surround us in the living room where we sit.