"Interstate" @ The Mississippi Review

Very happy to have one here. It's the All-Flash issue, edited by Kim Chinquee, and it's pretty much tops, with stories from Mary Akers, Randall Brown, Lydia Copeland, Kathy Fish, Avital Gad-Cykman, Greg Gerke, Daniel Grandbois, Peter Grandbois, Tiff Holland, Jeff Landon, Paul Lisicky, Robert Lopez, Darlin Neal, Carol Novack, Lorna Perez, Jen Pieroni, Peter Ramos, Gail Louise Siegel, Carrie Spell, Rusty Spell, Ed Taylor and Diane Willams.

Some samplings:

"She was next to me, all over my side of the question, and I told her, 'You're like an animal!'

Although, nobody worries about her manners, they know they're good."

—from Diane Williams' "Wrigglework"


"In my dreams all those animals talk. I see their eyes in my window, like glowing blue stars, and hear them at the foot of my bed—the pads of their feet, their dew claws in my blankets, their high, unpracticed words in my ear. It's some other language, but I know what they mean."

—from Lydia Copeland's "Checkers"


"I got a ride from a baldheaded truck driver named Gil all the way to Bedford, a small churchy town near Roanoke. Gil was a talker. In thirty minutes he filled me in on the various ways his children had disappointed him, and how to please a woman orally. 



'You just gotta get in there and love what you're doing,' he told me. He gripped his big hands around the steering wheel like someone trying to crack open walnuts."

—from Jeff Landon's "Where I'm Going"


"The trouble is this woman is smarter than me by at least half. I realized I needed a new strategy, something else to go on. This is how I came to the second decision.

I had to start thinking way over my own head."

—from Robert Lopez' "Nine off the Break"


"Am I asking for too much when I propose he was giving us the bones of something we could give flesh to in another life? Life after life—and, oh, the grand dinners beside the littered shore! And oh, the trips given up on two miles before the tip of the continent! Who could ever say what childhood was from here, what it felt like to be caught up inside the mouth of it?"

—from Paul Lisicky's "Mr. Cat"