Running Ad Astra

A short story
By Julie R. Sanchez

I can’t tell you that I’m sorry, just as I can’t tell you that I regret it. I’m not, and I don’t. I can tell you that it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, and that would be the truth. But I won’t say that, not now. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, but it did. That’s the truth, and I don’t see the use in hiding from it anymore.
I don’t expect you to believe me. It doesn’t matter either way. I’m going back to the top of the hill, and I’ve got nothing left—nothing but time. It’s the one thing I don’t want, but I have an eternity of it. The least I can do is use a little of it to explain. To explain. To explain—to whom? I don’t know. You’re dead, and I’m raving mad. That much I know is true. But the worst part? It still doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.

Aesop’s Lost Tale

On perseverance
By Kevin Wang

I’m ten minutes into my Econ 001 midterm when it comes to my attention that I have yet to answer a single question.

I pinch myself in an attempt to escape the testing room via the waking-up-from-a-dream method. After Plan A fails, I start chewing my gum more rigorously in an attempt to stimulate my brain.

The Earring

A short story
By Sara Schonfeld

“Oh. My. Gosh.”

Gina almost dropped her plate.

“What?”

“That’s him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” Gina admitted coyly, twirling a strand of her hair. “But he looks familiar. And he’s cute.” Across the dining hall, a dark-haired boy was watching Gina as he filled his salad plate with Romaine lettuce.

Elusive

Elusive
By Jerry Liu

Officer Jack Lorn sat around a pile of evidence, ready for another long night of deduction and thinking. Lorn was a distinguished cop who was trying to catch a serial killer. The job was never an easy one, and the current case was the hardest yet. The killer had already struck eight times and was especially fond of teasing the authorities. Every time Jack got to the scene, he was seconds too late. The last time he even chased the killer into a cemetery before the killer disappeared into thin air. Lorn vowed never to let this killer strike again.
The victims were all killed with a single shot to the head. The killer knew how to get his job done quickly and furtively. He didn’t even leave the empty bullet shell behind. What investigators were left with was just a dead body and a bullet lodged in the brain that ballistics could not identify to a registered gun. Facing a seemingly perfect assassin, Lorn was stumped. All he could do was rely on advanced mathematical modeling provided by his associate Jordan.

Platinum Falcon

Platinum Falcon
By Matthew Chiarello

“So, she was driving then?”

“Nah, stepped right out in front of it, is what I heard.”

“Huh,” the orderly wiped his slack brown with a rag out of his back pocket before leaning forward to ring his mop.

“Just one foot on the pavement, one big step into the road.” The creases in the second orderly’s forehead stood out in relief in the low light, a pensive frieze below his hairline.

“Damn.”

Red Tide

Red Tide
By Michael Scognamiglio

Peter craned his neck to see if the sand serpents were coming. When the wind howls, the powdery soft sand of Coffins Beach snakes across the packed sand with a casual menace. A flame flaring across an oil-slicked rope. His older sister and her boyfriend were already running for the safety of the high dunes, bare feet high-stepping in anticipatory pain. Damn them, damn them, they had buried him to his neck and now they had left him.

He thrashed his feet and arms in the muck beneath the surface. Sweat hung on his lips as he punched his fists up. The sand hissed closer with a calculated urgency–he knew he had been recognized, again, as ten-year old Peter Giampi, son of Ralph Giampi, esteemed captain of the North Star. Catches more fish than Christ, they say.

The Fox and the Boy

A Fable
By Michael Field

Once upon a time there was a boy named Adam. Adam and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, lived in a house on the edge of the woods. Adam loved to go exploring the woods.

The only other thing in the world Adam loved was getting presents, and he got a lot. Adam didn’t count the days until his birthday like other little boys, because his parents gave him gifts everyday. Adam wanted nothing because he was given everything.

Checking Out

A Short Story
By Sara Schonfeld

And then I did the worst possible thing I could have done in that situation: I nodded. That I was bobbing my head up and down absurdly should have been a clue that I had no idea what was going on, but, to make matters worse, the somewhat jumbled questions that were forming in my brain communicated a noise that seemed even more enthusiastically assenting than my bobble-headedness. She was talking and waving her hands and nodding even more enthusiastically than I, while I amused myself by picturing little synaptic cartoons in my brain shaking their heads at the tangled snare of my once functioning dendrites. This image must have distracted me long enough that she had finished talking and was holding out a slip of paper with a jumbled combination of numbers, most likely misconstruing my glee for a sudden moment of epiphany.

The Door

A Short Story
By Jerry Liu

It just appeared on the grass outside my dorm.

Walking out of my building, I saw a group of people standing around a door. Somehow, some prankster managed to put a door, frame and everything, on the grass. A random door standing in the middle of a grassy area where Indian students like to play cricket—what silliness! Hippy-looking classmates and one industrious lock-picker were trying to open the door, but despite their best efforts, the door would not open. More guys came to take a smoke break and tease my friend from the other side of the door. I scoffed at these immature people and walked to class.

The Thief

A short story.
By Michael Field

When I first saw him he was two rows behind me, leaning against the window, hunched over and reading a book.

His scraggly black hair covered his eyes. Every now and then he would run his long fingers through his hair, pushing it out of the way. Every time, the hair would stubbornly drape itself back over his face.

Monkey Bars

A short story
By Steve Waye

The bars were breathing so that they would take me in and wrap around my head and not in and out like a bullfrog but warty like one, yes, and bubbling. “So that,” as if with a purpose.

The God of Baskin Robbins

A short story
By Joe Pinsker

The Laurel Street Baskin Robbins Ice Cream Store should have considered renaming itself Gerald’s Ice Cream Store, or at least that is what Gerald thought.

Gerald was the dominating force behind the glass, a self-proclaimed god among scooping men (even if he only kept this to himself). Through some sort of inexplicable power, Gerald was the master of overtime, pushing shifts like any capitalizing typist. His stints were lengthy, spanning occasionally into the double digits and demonstrating an Olympian’s endurance.