“Sunday Morning Dreamscape”   The silk umbrella that covered her head had a hole in its top, in case of rain. She was meeting her husband for a rendezvous outside a phone booth. Her daughter followed, six steps behind, reciting the only two definitions of sodomy that she knew. An elevated train on the left side of the road stopped; three men fell out onto a steel track below. The daughter ditched her at a fork in the highway, went on alone to the dock to meet an old lover who would take her away on a cruise. She had forgotten her ticket; he said she could share his: number 660266. He asked if she needed a baby sling; she predicted he would marry someone young.   “The Way She Gathered Stones”   She…

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Editor’s Note: We welcome Jane Ward back to the FictionalCafé ‘zine pages with a new short story. Her first, “Balancing Act,” appeared in the June, 2014 issue. * “It’s not like that,” she said. They were sitting on the steps of the old house where Raynor had grown up, looking out at the moss-covered rocks on the front lawn, and trying to get the bottle caps to land on top of the biggest rock the way they had done when they were children. The house still reminded Tara of the house in Forrest Gump, the way its size was somehow mediated by its straightforward shape and layout, so that the place managed to appear unassuming. “It sounds pretty much ‘like that’ to me,” he told her, keeping his hand in the air after it let…

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Editor’s note: The following excerpt is from a newly published novel, The Reaper’s Daughter, by K. M. Randall. Be sure to watch her novel trailer here at Goodreads.   PROLOGUE Present The rolling green of her eyes was dimming fast, losing color and life to the quick click of time that beat out her days and nights, a perpetual circle that was now fading to a close. Light brown hair that had been recently styled into looping curls was limp against the black pillowcase―a metaphor for her wilted spirit, I mused, thinking offhandedly how proud my English professor would be at my thoughtful use of language. I sighed. I didn’t want to be here. When her eyes met mine, I knew she saw me for who I really was—what I really was. She reached out…

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