Jersey Devil Press

Issue Eleven! Issue 11!! I11!!! 11!!!!11

OK, now I’m dizzy.

Anyway, Issue Eleven is now online for your reading pleasure and features new stories by Micah Dean Hicks, Shea Newton, Isaac James Baker, Leah Petersen, and Tarl Roger Kudrick, as well as the triumphant return of Brian Long. It’s a good ‘n. All y’all should get to readin’ nowish. Seriously. Before I figure out some other way to devolve the language in this post.

You can find the stories here, and the .pdf here.

Shea Newton



We’ve been given a weapon. They are by prescription only. We’ve got a snub nosed revolver and ammunition.

We are plagued by growths, some more powerful than others. We have hands that will not take what we want, that will take what we don’t. We have feet that pull opposite directions, mouths that speak louder than others, eyes that see too much.

Our handgun will cripple the growths, rapidly and violently as they occur. We could graduate to a more precise instrument, a scalpel someday, but now we have a handgun. We use it with little or no discretion.

It is peculiar to fight a weapon from our hands, hands that strain to point the barrel back into our heart. It is strange to hold the weapon in our hands and shoot, hoping that if there are other hands they will be different.

Though it’s illegal to use recreational weapons, we do. With bats and knives we’ve hit our legs and arms and eyes in order to sit restful, blurry and numb. But the handgun is different, it keeps us safe. From eyes that don’t see clearly and our hands. It has to.

There are others with growths. We’ve seen them, looked longingly at five legs walking in near unison, three hands embracing a lover. We can’t walk in unison, it’s exhausting to try. With the handgun we’ve grown accustomed to simply the legs that walk forward comfortably, eyes that look to the clouds on purpose and mouths speaking simple sentences.

It was frightening at first, aiming at our growths each morning, hoping that our feet were bad feet. But now our blood clots sooner and we don’t often feel faint. We know that when we shake, the first shot will steady our aim.

We’ve let others use our gun, we have ammunition. They have lost their mouths and ears, sometimes they take weeks to recover. Maybe they only had one mouth to begin with.

We’ve been through heads. Recovery is quick. We’ve become accustomed.






SHEA NEWTON lives in Boise, ID, where he recently decided to never sing karaoke again.

Howdy. Welcome to Issue Eleven, sandwiched squarely between the launch of the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology and the book release picnic. I think it’s fair to assume you’ve partaken/will partake in at least one, so we’ll skip over that portion of the intro. *cough* buy it *cough*

Anyway, hi. This month we’ve got some truly spectacular fiction, starting with the cover story, “Crawfish Noon,” by Micah Dean Hicks. It’s a Western involving crustaceans. You need to read it.

You need to read the other five stories, too, starting with Shea Newton’s trippy “The Tools of Amputation.” Then it’s on to Isaac James Baker’s punk-rock “Too Much Blood” and Leah Petersen’s petty, hysterical “Theo.” We switch it up a bit for the comically absurd “The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle is a Bitch to Solve” by the returning Brian Long, and then we close on “Thinking of Ewe,” by Tarl Roger Kudrick, a story about a guy who is not Batman.

So there you go. Six stories, some serious, some not so serious, and some about sheep. Pull up a desk chair and dig in.

Links to the individual stories are below, and the .pdf can be found here.

– Eirik Gumeny

Crawfish Noon, Micah Dean Hicks
“That day the dirt flushed with blue blood,
scraps of shell and leg segments strewn like cards.”

The Tools of Amputation, Shea Newton
“We’ve been given a weapon. They are by prescription only.”

Too Much Blood, Isaac James Baker
“The air was warm and thick the night we became teenage killers,
one of those sweaty, steamy ones when humidity covers Chicago like a wet blanket.”

Theo, Leah Petersen
“Why people want to spend a beautiful day like this inside the penis building
I can’t figure out.”

The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle is a Bitch to Solve, Brian Long
“‘Honestly? Who reads the fucking newspaper anymore, for Christ’s sake?’”

Thinking of Ewe, Tarl Roger Kudrick
“If Gary had learned anything in college, he’d learned he wasn’t the smartest person in the world. But he knew mixed-up crazy when he saw it, and this was it.”