Literary short stories by established and emerging writers. Excerpts: Melanie Rae Thon Saviors The ambulance took seventeen astonishing minutes. Willis and Louise sang the whole time, soft and low, sweet rock-a-bye love songs, as if the man were their first and last and most beloved only child. Armand ML Inezian See Me These old memories--the tastes of candies of his youth, pictures of rooms on other continents, the smell of long-defunct hair tonics, conversations with relatives who'd died decades ago--who needed them? Alvin Handelman Hurricane Man When my brother Jeremy died, in 1996, at the age of fifty-eight, I felt as if an enormous hole had been dug out of my chest. I was not lightened by it. Eileen FitzGerald Enough Dead Squirrel They'd found salvation finally in a psychologist, an elfish man who called it a phobia, taught slow breathing, and loved to talk about Mary Poppins--the books, not the movie. "He's a very smart boy," said the doctor. "It's not easy to be a smart boy. Smart means sensitive, and sensitive can make you sad." Hugh Sheehy After the Flood The Mississippi swells up and covers the town and the surrounding forest, devastating all visible creation. Hundreds of egrets fly north; there is no counting the dead. Ann Beattie Something, Something A line of re-gifting impossible to keep track of, a mobius strip of swirling presents, flashing like a conga line of drunks in Tortola at sunset, tenuously connecting a PR person in Paris to a woman in the Florida Keys, then expanding into the universe, eventually to disappear into the Black Hole of gifts. Evan Lavender-Smith Bad Numbers "I thought I was done for, Bob, I thought I was going to die in that old refrigerator. So I took the time to really go over every inch of me, really say a good goodbye to myself. I touched between my toes and along the creases of my eyelids." Yiyun Li Interview by Linda B. Swanson