2018 Authors

This was years before the fire they called the Beast burned up half the town and the money hose slowed from a gush to a trickle. Back then I drove one of those mammoth trucks that haul the raw ore out of the excavation pits. We were removing the forest in neat rectangular chunks, like date squares from a pan. Peeling away a soggy carpet of muskeg to scoop out what had been steeping here for a hundred million years, the sour black honey of time.

Everything about the operation was orderly, methodical, streamlined. If you […]

Fresh Oil, Loose Stone

by Heather Rolland

The tar spreader lumbered up the hill, spraying a thin film of blackness on all in its path: road bed, weeds, and the occasional careless worker’s feet or Gatorade bottle. The dump truck’s gates clanged, followed by the shush of gravel, flowing like water out the back and onto the waiting tar. Raked and rolled and rolled again, inch by inch, mile by mile, the rutted old dirt road received its makeover. Julia watched from the picture window of her doublewide’s living room—the one Bruno had installed during the first decade of their tenure on the mountain.

The […]

Fort Mac

Fresh Oil, Loose Stone