

That spring, the wildflower bloom was the biggest in seven years. The Hollywood Hills turned green, soaking up unexpected rain. The mood in Los Angeles was good. If there were climate change and smog and drinking water ...
Superbloom by Maggie Weng
Fiction, LAR Online

The boys in the madrasa have never touched the hands of any woman, except for their mothers or sisters. They invite Alef to play a game with them, led by seventeen-year-old Qaf, who wants to be the first to touch ...
Heaven by Mir Arif
Fiction, LAR Online

Markus Tamas Goldstein and his wife, Veronika Renat Goldstein (nee Kellner), had a very small farm with a very small dairy on the outskirts of a very small town in Hungary. Their operation was an outpost of the ...
State Fair by S.L. Wisenberg
Fiction, LAR Online

Martín Cordero drove the spray rig in the vineyards where I grew up, a farmhand-for-hire who worked all over San Luis Obispo County, but in my memory he’s a storyteller first, held in the stage lights of my boyhood ...
Pretenders by John Carr Walker
Fiction, LAR Online

One Friday evening, Uncle Jim beat Aunt Linda bloody and knocked out her front teeth during an argument that started when she accidentally bumped her leg against the kitchen table and spilled some of his whiskey. ...
Closed Door Blues by Alec Kissoondyal
Fiction, LAR Online

There are no manta rays like on the brochure, and Divemaster Barry, tall and sitcom-handsome, is not your friend. He pretends to be your friend. He’s very familiar in a performative way. He says you can call him DMB, ...
Bob in the Deep End by Gurth Harper
Fiction, LAR Online

My mother was taller than me, I think. I’m not certain, because she died when I was seven, and I've never asked anyone how tall she was. I'm five foot eight inches. From pictures, I know she was around my height, but ...
Remember This Morning by Victor McConnell
Fiction, LAR Online

They are in the basement, sitting among the boxes of communion wine and sacrament. They had been halfway through choir practice when it began and now they sit here, on the ground, most ...
Scenario by Dave Housley
Fiction, LAR Online

Dora texts, tells me to ditch J.R., says Rodan, the bar we’re going to, is trash. Gary’s band is playing at Berlin, that horrible cruise-y nightclub in Boystown. They’re booking punk shows now. We can hang ...