No coverage, not even one bar; the battery was dead anyway. It was still daytime, but there was an overcast and the sky had a perfectly even dullness, so there was no way to tell what time of day it was, much less which direction was north or south or anything else for that matter. A two-lane blacktop road snaked up into the distance and disappeared into some trees, or a forest if you wanted to get technical about it. It also snaked down toward some lumpy hills and disappeared there as well. What sounded like a two-stroke chainsaw could be heard in the distance, but it was impossible to tell whether it was up in the forest or down in the lumpy hills. This had been happening more often lately. Two different ways to go, with a dead battery and no bars, and nobody left to blame. The first

Written by Laura Cody The first day I met Nate, he told me he was going to kill his dealer.  I took it with a grain of salt.  I’d been adrift for a while, floating between rock-bottom and moderate dysfunctionality after an epic bender had landed me back in Al-Anon. At forty-two days into recovery, I was keeping distance from my old friends who hung out with my old enemy, the bottle. In fact, the whole reason I was even in Miss Pamela’s Stained Glass Workshop that day was because my counselor said I needed new hobbies and new faces. (That Miss Pamela must’ve offered hefty kickbacks to every addiction counselor in the county because the class was filled with addicts). Nate just happened to be the guy I found myself beside at the worktable on day one when Miss Pamela instructed us to introduce ourselves to our “glassmates.” Contemplating how much

Written by Graham Elder Foreword This story was submitted as part of the inaugural New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) fiction writing contest last year. The Contest rules were very specific. No more than 1500 words, and contestants must either: Write about the doctor behind the curtain or invent the back story of the patient you didn’t meet until it was too late. I decided to try and accomplish both. Alas, I didn’t win, but it was a fun effort. “Curtains” All doctors have at least one case they wish they could take back – a do-over. A case that sits deep in the pit of their stomachs and rots with time … “What’ve you got for me this morning, Julie?” “A banker, a farmer, and a local GP.” “Is there a joke coming? I asked. “No joke.” She smiled under her mask. “Hmmm. A GP? Anyone I know?” “Well, Mark, since you’re

Featured in The Best of CafeLit, vol 11; 2022 You linger an extra five minutes over your second cup of coffee, luxuriating in the quiet house after what virtually amounted to fourteen months of prison time in G-pop. With friends, you pay dutiful lip-service to the hidden blessings of the pandemic, the silver linings behind the sorrows. You say it taught you to slow down, to enjoy simple pleasures – a home-cooked meal, a jigsaw puzzle, a socially-distanced stroll in fading sunlight. You don’t mention how your house shrunk to the dimensions of a tuna can, how your husband set up his work-from-home office in the dining room, so his voice boomed throughout the house all day on videoconferences, how it became impossible to exit or leave without his notice, how you couldn’t enter the kitchen for a nibble without his head bobbing over your shoulder to see what you were