Caroline Morris is an MFA student at the University of Oregon. Her short stories have appeared in Permafrost, where she won the 2004 Fiction Contest, and the Tulane Review. She was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize and has been a resident at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is represented by Trident Media Group and is currently working on a novel about women and hunting set in suburban Charlotte.

Flotsam is a story by Caroline Morris.

October was fading. The tourists had gone. From our windows, the beach stretched empty east and west, broken only by the lighthouse high on the bluff and the channel that tied the sea to Sesachacha Pond . Daisy could race on the beach without a leash. No children crossed the dune path under the kitchen window. The waves, after days of calm, resumed their pounding. Newspaper delivery stopped and the beach houses, save mine, were shuttered against the chill. Like the expanse of sand and saltwater, the days belonged to Daisy and me entirely. Free, uninterrupted, and a bit desolate.

is a poem by Giles Morris

My heart is broken.
I pledge allegiance to slate, blood, and bone.
To the blue-brown slate on which I sat,
an S-shaped stairway to a white brick house.
In my 11th year, I scratched my name there
and shed my first tears of despair.
The roof of St. David's Church across the street also slate.
The only stone that shatters.

To blood because it makes me sick,
And reminds me that I'll die.
The color red.

And bone, the deepest pain.
A shallow grave baked bright in sun.
To Slate, Blood, and Bone.

Jonathan Wei's fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train , The North American Review , Rivendell and other publications. He is a fellow of the Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, the 2004 Borchardt Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the winner of the 2003 Glimmer Train Fiction Open. His work has also been honored by the Lorian Hemingway Short Fiction Contest, Writers at Work and The Literal Latte' Short Fiction Contest, among others. He lives at present in the Pacific Northwest.