by David C. Metz

They were children of the Great Depression, taught loyalty to family by their Catholic mother, a lesson Maggie had absorbed. Now, thirty years later, she looked at her brother Bill across the oval dining room table—short and thickset with an aura that made him appear bigger than he was, sleeves of his white shirt rolled past his elbows, thick fingers pressed to his temples—and decided it was time to make coffee.

by Nathan Geeting

As the hell-hot summer blistered on, Tommy died again and again. He and Simon had started playing war in the woods behind their homes, near the pond and mosquitos. Simon always led the missions since, as he explained, it was his grandpa’s stories they were reenacting, but they used their collective imagination to fill in the details that were, apparently, “too much” for nine-year-olds.