EDITOR'S PICKS
 

Barbara Jacksha's Pick: Lottery by Steve Western
Even in the most uneventful lives a certain amount of routine is welcome. For Tom, a thirty-seven-year-old gas station attendant, and his girlfriend Dotty, twenty-six years old and a hotel laundress, the welcome routine is buying a lottery ticket every payday and listening to the winning numbers announced on television at six-fifty-five every Saturday evening...

Michael S. McKlusky's Pick: Second Drafts, Primal Fears, and a Good Ending by Greg Beatty
In the beginning, God created man, in his own image, pure and glorious, but mortal and limited.

In all the universe there was only God and man, and man imploded from the transcendent glory of it all...

Debi Orton's Pick: Yellow Pullover by F. John Sharp
The first thing, the only thing, I could see, my pupils straining through irises made pinpoint by the August noon, was the splash of yellow lit by sunbeams, aimed from ninety-three million miles away with ferocious accuracy, through the skylight and to a direct hit on her and only her, standing at the teller who was swimming, with the rest of the us, in a sea of tube-light green...

Vanitha Sankaran's Pick: Choosing Id by Alan Stewart Carl
There is a certain kind of clarity found at the bottom of beer number six. Not revelations of grand import, but realizations of the gut, honesty exhumed by alcohol...

David Shapiro's Pick: Fragment by Sandra Gillies
When he opened his eyes, Doyle could see only the familiar dig site, its area cordoned off with yellow tape, divided into squares for excavation and mapping. His latest project, the search for the early colonial settlement mentioned in letters from the period. He returned to his digging...

Didi Wood's Pick: Taking the Edge Off by Deena L. Trouten
The baby is screaming in her bassinet, more from anxiety than need, as five-year-old sister sings in spite of her — Barney's "Clean Up" song — while bouncing on the bed, carefully avoiding the broken plank in the box spring...