Terrain.org fiction in this issue:
  

Latitude
by Joanna Beth Tweedy, with Audio

It was this figurative state of affairs she’d been attempting to communicate after scouring the aisles in search of pickled anything-but-cucumbers, except her response to the stockboy’s not just helpful but also cheerful “The pickles are right here, ma’am” left the young man puzzled, as is wont to occur when 16 years are confronted with sarcasm ten years their senior. “Um, well, maybe you remember your name?” he tried, reaching out and gently placing four fingers on the fossa side of her elbow. He was skinny and smelled like her first kiss.

Bycatch
by Tom Noyes

I’m stern-side, leaning over the gunwale, answering nature’s call when I see her break the surface. She gets a good five or six feet of air before crashing back into the water. As I tuck myself in and zip up, I’m thinking maybe steelhead, maybe lake trout, maybe sturgeon, but my sunglasses are in the cabin, and the sky’s cloudless, and the lake’s all shimmers and flashes, a carpet of diamonds, so I can’t quite make her out. On her second leap, though, I get a good look and then some. Like how Goliath got a good look at David.

If, Minnesota
by Steven Woodward

Ellis counts his arrival in If as the last in a line of cosmic jokes: a town named for possibility. As the bus pulls away, he feels that everything around him—the implied query of the town name, the city population sign, and the coffee mugs stamped with question marks at the Flying J truck stop—is calculated to remind him of his absurd existence. His choices cling to him as though beads on a string, each one a glassy reminder of the mistakes that bring him here.