Third Reader | Current Issue

Current Third Reader Issue – Fall 2008

SHORT STORIES

The Truth Is by Michael Copperman

It starts like this: an innocent longing, a watching from outside. Never the cool kid, you long for that swagger and swank. Starting young, admire someone who’s got it. Your best friend Jack, for instance, who has the ease of a performer, the ability to draw all eyes in a room without effort. You’re ten years old, don’t understand yet what it means to have a girlfriend, but he has one, Melinna Markstrom, the blond who will grow up to become a cheerleader and marry after senior year of state college, become immediately pregnant, and style herself a suburban soccer mom. . . . more

Dolphins Speak God by Stephanie Gayle

On Tuesday I realized that the dolphins were discussing God. I ran to the lab’s library and thumbed the pages of the spiral-bound conversation logs. The vocabulary lists contained concrete words: fish, water, rain, pebbles, trainer. Abstract concepts: time and beauty, appeared rarely.

It took my childhood hero, Jeffrey Maines, twelve years of recording dolphin vocalizations to uncover that click chirp chirp meant “fish are here!” He also found that context and pitch color everything dolphins say. In another setting, and at a lower pitch, click chirp chirp means, “The stupid hoop trick again?”. . . more

FLASH FICTION

Kyle by Heather Weatherly

A Promise In Detroit by K. Tuck

POETRY

Relic by Gary Beck

Ants by Nancy Burke

film noir: a retelling by Ronnie K. Stephens

Charcoal Memories by Bill Burkholder