The Thing About Luzhin
BY MICHAEL MORECI
An Excerpt from Baron's Chronicle
Here's the thing about Luzhin: from the night we met, I knew he was not an honest person. It's an opinion never changed, even as we became what some would call friends. There was something about him that inspired me; here was a person who came to America in the early ‘90s when he was twenty, abandoning Russia in spite of its imminent overhaul. And by the way he tells his story, you can tell Luzhin wasn't discouraged by the abrupt, life-altering move. After all, living in Russia, as Luzhin explained it to me, ...
How We Remember
BY MIRANDA TRAIN
My grandmother has $7,000 under her mattress in case she has to flee to Israel. My father won't go to Germany, and he especially won't buy German made ovens. I grew up in a new era, the politically correct environment of an East Coast American suburb. As a third generation Jew of an assimilated non-religious family, it was my job to forget. Not only did I think my family was crazy for holding a grudge, I had German friends.
There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson. ...
Piedad
BY LYNNE BAMAT MIJANGOS
Still in short pants, but tall enough to peer into a cradle of elaborately carved roble, a small boy watched an infant kick her pink-bootied feet and announced that when that little girl grew up, he was going to marry her. Four generations later not a living soul knows if Manuel Rovelo formally asked for Antonia Argüello’s hand in marriage before or after he held the deed to El Retiro, a cattle ranch near the border of Guatemala, just this side of the gem green lake La Esmeralda.
Only one other fact brackets the life of Antonia: she allowed no one to see her feet. ...
Hard-on
BY BRETT BERK
Toby stuffed the new singlet into his bag along with a thermal and two sweatshirts, then sat at his desk and logged onto the school’s home page. He needed to see the name again. Plus, he knew his mom would be waiting for him in the kitchen, and if he showed his face before leaving, she’d start nagging him about breakfast, and it would just spiral out from there: from not eating properly, to being too skinny, to the wrestling team, to his father. “You only wrestle to please him,” she’d say, wielding a box of Eggo’s. “Can’t ...
Garden
BY SUSAN TEPPER
At the garden center Lamont bought a tray of mixed pansies. He'd walked a couple miles to get there, braving cold winds gusting off the Long Island Sound, a steady mist soaking his camouflage jacket. And what did he find when he got there? A greenhouse full of ceramic pots. No nice humid greenhouse odor. Long empty shelves where lush potted plants should've been on display.
Disgusted, Lamont picked up his tray of pansies and exited the greenhouse through the newly installed automatic doors. Wind off the sound hitting him hard in the face, pelting the ...
Marionette
BY MELANIE PAPPADIS
Inside their apartment, Samuel closes the bathroom door behind him and turns, with both his hands, the skinny silver lock. He checks for Fita in the mirror. He checks for her after what happened last time she was here, how she snuck up, how he didn’t even hear her coming, how she yelled in her loud Spanish voice, and yanked his hands from his mother’s drawer, how the drawer came off its rollers and everything went falling, spilling out onto the bathroom floor. A hundred tubes of lipstick rolled around their feet. Fita bent down, hugging her arms across ...
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