by Menasheh Fogel Sophie pulls away from the door, breathing hard, trying to decide what to do. She peers again through the peephole. The man is still standing there. The automatic hall light flicks off, yet she can make him out in the fading light from the small window above the stairwell. He appears perfectly normal, maybe a bit nondescript. He breathes motionlessly, gazing forward down the stairs. She wonders what he could possibly want, what he might be thinking.  She remembers …

by Luke Fegenbush “I don’t know why I do the things I do. It feels like an accident, but I’m just the way I am. People hate it. I don’t want to impress anyone. I just want to be and I can’t even do that.” His knees were up by his chest in a defensive gesture, with his shoes on the coffee table, nudging the box of tissues aside.  The boy's name was Jace and, due to him being twenty-something, I afforded him a little self-loathing before I stepped in. I let the evening’s late-spring …

by Margaret Elysia Garcia His proposition arrived as a notification from a kink dating site she’d eagerly signed up for and then promptly forgot. His message came between a reminder for her annual colonoscopy, and an announcement that her insurance premium was increasing, along with several ads by her favorite shoe designer which she, of course, opened first. Christopher was not a stranger to her—she’d met both him and his wife at a BDSM convention in Los Angeles back when Monica thought …