* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to Arch Literary Journal.
About Arch Literary Journal:
We seek to publish new writing that transforms the way we envision, startles us into new ways of knowing, subverts expectations, and delivers new experiences of language. We embrace multiplicity: we look to mirror and extend the diverse nature of today’s most exciting literature both in the U.S. and around the world.
Fiction excerpt:
The Man With Two Arms
by Billy LombardoSEVERAL MILES WEST OF THE EXACT MIDPOINT BETWEEN COMISKEY Park and Wrigley Field in a town named Forest Park, on a street named Lathrop, in the first floor apartment of a two-story made of lumber and red brick, at eleven o’clock, on the night of May 15, 1984, just fourteen hours before the world’s greatest baseball player was born to the world, Henry Granville applied cocoa butter to the mountainous belly of Lori Granville, his very pregnant wife.
A woman named Judy Copeland lived in the flat above the Granvilles. She was 103 years old, and apart from the fact that she controlled the heat, by way of the Honeywell thermostat on her dining room wall, in both apartments of the stiflingly warm two-flat, Henry had no complaints about the tenant upstairs. She made no noise, and as she was nearly deaf, neither did she complain of it. To offset the heat, Henry, who’d grown accustomed to sleeping on the right side of his wife during their courtship, switched to the left side, next to the window, when they bought the house on Lathrop and inherited Judy Copeland. Even on the coldest of winter nights, when February bit like teeth into the ears of the city, Henry slept with the window open.
Akopos 