CREATIVE NONFICTION Lisa Renze: "Drive" POETRY Doris Lynch: "Intertidal" Daye Phillippo: "The Way Things Are Supposed to Be" Michael Brockley: "One-Button Man and National Gun Day" James Green: "The Weight of the Heart" FICTION Elliott Scott: "Stormin' Eddie" READ FOR FLYING ISLAND Flying Island Journal is seeking readers to join our staff. We care about representation and are looking to diversify our team and the work we publish. What is a reader? A reader is an invaluable member of the editorial team. Readers help read submissions and recommend work for Flying Island to publish. What is involved? This volunteer position will take roughly four hours a month. Readers will be assigned between five and ten stories, poems, or essays per month, and will be asked to assess whether each piece is a good fit for publication in Flying Island. Readers closely collaborate with relevant genre editors. Reader candidate background
Image credit: Roman Kozhevnikov It’s the last walk of the night that makes my mind wander along with my body. The dogs relish an unencumbered path, stopping occasionally to watch their breath hang in the air, while the cold arrests our lungs. It’s the cold and the quiet that make me think of another night. A different cold. A different place. A different time. He drove north and swung right where the road dead-ended into a cornfield. Defrocked stalks jutted from the frozen earth in jagged, incongruous patterns—a life-size, child’s crayon depiction of the landscape. A cold 12-pack of Milwaukee’s “Beast” as we called the cheap, watery beer, slid along the seat between us. Pat reached over and grabbed a couple cans, then wedged the flimsy cardboard against the gear shift in his beat-up pickup. Michael Jackson’s voice rose softly in the background from a mixed tape that belonged to his sister. A product of our homogenous small town 1980’s coming of age, Pat, like many of us, wa