Recommended Reading from Online Magazines

We’re hunkering down here in South Texas, amigos, on the verge of Hurricane Alex. We’ve hit up Wal-Mart and stocked up on our non-perishables and water. We’ve filled up our gas tanks, boarded up our windows, stacked sandbags by the front and back doors, just like the local news told us to.

ME: All prepared, hon.

WIFE: Did you bring the Duracells? What about the candles?

ME: Shit.

While we make our way back to Sam Walton’s cornucopia one more time for those AA’s, check out this week’s fiction picks. They’ll tickle you with words like raindrops. They’ll jolt you with thunderous prose.

Until the storm passes, dear friends. Enjoy.

– Robert Paul Moreira

– It had been three months and I thought things would have gotten easier. The children still cried at night. They still asked about their mother. On clear mornings, I took them to the cemetery, which was all that was left of the old town. From that hill we could see the remains of the valley, and the sharp scar where the mountain had slipped. The planes flew only on clear, cloudless days, and we watched for them in the skies above us: whirling, see-sawing, their shaky wings trembling in the mountain wind. The children waved. We counted the parachutes drifting down and down. It was a game we played. I taught Mariela and Ximena to differentiate between German and French as we sifted through the aid packages. I helped Efraín pull the parachutes from the mud, and clean them off. — Daniel Alarcón in The Big Ugly Review

– The five-thousand-strong Han army that had set out for the north in the ninth month had been reduced to a defeated group of fewer than four hundred soldiers—weary, wounded, and without their general—when in the eleventh month they reached a fort on the frontier. News of their defeat quickly reached the capital of Chang’an via post-horse. — Li Ling in This is a Public Space

– On the tarmac at the Acapulco airport, after twelve hours of traveling and in the heat of late afternoon, I faint. Three elderly women surround me. I can hear their voices calling to the officials, Ayuda! La senora…ayuda! Ayuda! Their voices are so beautiful, I want to lie on the sizzling asphalt and listen to their singing. They are like the Sirens calling Ulysses, I think, and I want nothing more than to live my final days on their island. I imagine myself swimming there, each stroke through the waves blocking and unblocking the song of the Sirens like a heartbeat. I dive beneath the surface to see thousands of creatures, sirenians and prehistoric anableps big as sea turtles swimming alongside me. And just as suddenly, I surface again, feeling the burn of hot grit embedded in the skin of my hands and forearms where I tried to break my fall. I smell the tar of the asphalt and feel the wet drip of saliva on my cheek. When I open my eyes, the old women are grabbing their chests, their hearts, grateful to god that I have come to. — Melanie Jennings in The Adirondack Review

– The traffic was starting to build up. The driver fished a magnetic dome light from under the seat, attached it to the roof and blipped a siren. “We’ve a bit of a way to go,” his companion said, a stocky man wearing a waxed jacket on this warm June day. “Would you like a paper?” — Tony MacNabb in The Barcelona Review

– Several miles west of the exact midpoint between Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in a town named Forest Park, on a street named Lathrop, in the first floor apartment of a two-story made of lumber and red brick, at eleven o’clock, on the night of May 15, 1984, just fourteen hours before the world’s greatest baseball player was born to the world, Henry Granville applied cocoa butter to the mountainous belly of Lori Granville, his very pregnant wife. — Billy Lombardo in Arch Literary Journal