Category: WTP spotlight: fiction

Elizabeth Sloan Tyler Award for the Literary Exit, Pursued by Bear By Jacqueline Kolosov  See all the winners in the 2017 Special Winners Edition In the coming years, walking his daughter to daycare, or holding her hand as they cross the street, Peter Fricke will find himself asking if it was serendipity or fate that…

From WTP Vol. V #8 Monstrous Men By Nick Sweeney A Gift from the Italians As a child, I lived in an apartment overlooking K Street, the imperial city centre of pageantry and postcards. When I started piano lessons with Mr Z, our music room contained only a piano and two stools. It was gradually…

From WTP Vol. V #7 The Legacy By Bob Beach A company town in the coal country of West Virginia offered a bleak existence for a child growing up. The dust that sifted daily from the mine shafts settled into every crevice of our community, painting it a thousand shades of gray. It seeped into…

From WTP Vol. V #7 The Woman at the Window By Sari Friedman Black silhouette of the woman at my window. There whether my eyes are open or closed. Her emotional imprint, the hunched shoulder shape of her longing. She stares out toward the kibbutz’s cows. Waiting for someone or something. You know when you’re…

From WTP Vol. V #2 Boots and the Infinite Struggle of Attachment Gwen Grace I’m inordinately attached to a pair of boots.  It’s been a long, albeit interesting year since I ordered them. Upon arrival, they were cut-out, sexy, black-leather perfection. They were promising. Now, the leather is peeling and the dye has faded on…

From WTP Vol. V #6 “Night Marchers” By Heidi Turner We waited for the night-marchers. The mountains held legends between their arms; stories flew between the peaks and through the passes like thread, sewing the past to us, and we slept outside in the firelight. Gods flitted past our ears along with the mosquitoes. The…

From WTP Vol. V #6 Ghosting By Christian Holt Abby’s specialty involved protein interaction, to see which protein signifiers turn on when they interact with stimuli. The experiments required a great deal of repetition, preparing slides, cleaning pipettes, maintaining controls, etc. The goal, of course, was to find a physical relationship that everyone outside her…

From WTP Vol. V #6 Delmas By Vic Sizemore It is the last good day of Delmas and Lillian’s fifty-three years together, the last day that they dared the ferry, the beach walk they have relished for so long, the treacherous logs washed ashore. It is late, and now the cold off the sound slaps…

From WTP Vol. V #5 Going Too Fast By Lynne Viti My sister and I are walking down a long pink hall in the nursing home at Charlestown. A Catholic seminary in its former life, it’s now a huge complex of buildings on the south edge of Baltimore, apartments for affluent retirees, and an assisted…

From WTP Vol. V #5 The Perfect Diver By Elizabeth Stott Marjorie swims, her blue hat bobbing like a child’s ball. She repeats her stroke like a mechanical doll. Don is standing at the shallow end, rubbing his hands over his chest and shoulders to keep warm. Overhead, through the glass roof, he can see…

From Vol. V #4 Runny Yolks By David Arthur Kay “The early bird catches the mother-fucking worm,” the pea coat–covered Ed Lover look-alike says stoically as if to no one, as if to everyone in the Brownsville bodega around the corner from the walk-up apartment from which you departed with just one mission—to get your girl…

From WTP Vol. V #4 Meditations on Dear Petrov By Susan Tepper Set in nineteenth-century Russia during a time of war The North My tiredness is extreme. Lord of the mercy. I kneel before an altar of water and salt. Such cold rooms. Making the sign of the cross. A broken chair. One by one…