“Nobility” by Michael Grant Zimmer

As usual, I detected the Keeper before he unlocked the gate; a waft of plum brandy and rotting gums announced him through the solid oak . . .

“Maribelle’s Petard” by Carol Mitchell

“Anna.”

Maribelle froze. Maybe she had imagined the word. Maybe it had come in on the ocean breeze that drifted through the curtains covering their open balcony doors . . .

“On or Off This Island” by Robert Arellano

My grandmother Fefita sits for la cena while my great-grandmother Maria Antonia cautions her on the caprices of obstetrics. Fefita is six months pregnant with her first child, my aunt Juana.

“The crying is horrible,” Doña Maria Antonia counsels her fresh-faced daughter-in-law, “but the silence is far worse.”

“A Park in California” by Jane Hammons

He walked down Telegraph Avenue toward campus, stepping around street kids, doped up and dirty . . .

“The Stuff” by Ross Middleton

“So, you got the stuff? . . .”

“The Butcher and the American” by Andrew Cotto

The American walked the ancient Italian countryside on unsteady feet. It was a familiar path, but he had been up very, very late with guests from the States, toasting to liberal optimism with liberal quantities of Tuscan wine. They had, essentially, drunk all night, waiting for election results from the States, which didn’t report until three a.m. Italian time that Barack Obama had become the forty-fourth president of the United States . . .

“Johnny Was” by George Dimos

Johnny was barely fourteen when he started drinking . . .

“Relief” by Adeola Adeniyi

On a humid mid-July Thursday evening, a young woman in a cream-colored Macy’s pantsuit went into the small bodega on Nostrand and Lexington Avenue (by the twenty-four-hour Laundromat) and walked to the back refrigerator . . .