It’s raining, and the living room ceiling drips, drips, and drips because the husband passed up on that free roof inspection and maybe he was afraid of the problems it might reveal, and his father-in-law now lives in the basement, and the husband and the wife keep finding blood-blotted tissues that look like Rorschach tests in the wastebasket, and the father-in-law won’t go to the doctor no matter how much the husband and the wife beg him, and the rain gets louder and louder, and the hole in the …
Cyclops
And then the Cyclops winked back. Daniel Galef writes. Artwork by Anthony Guardado (@vinoburrito on all socials), a Bay Area illustrator known best for his fan works. He enjoys vending at art events, building plastic models, and general tomfoolery ← Return to the issue …
Companions
I didn’t feel guilty taking this family trip the day after you passed away. I simply couldn’t cancel. I couldn’t stop living my life indefinitely during your months of hospice. All the literature emphasizes the importance of self-care when your spouse is infirmed. Good days, bad days, how should I have known when you would pass? My kids were en route with their families. I’d prepared my grad students to muddle by on their own. “We take these family trips to assuage our guilt,” you’d …
Man in a Box
by Menasheh Fogel Sophie pulls away from the door, breathing hard, trying to decide what to do. She peers again through the peephole. The man is still standing there. The automatic hall light flicks off, yet she can make him out in the fading light from the small window above the stairwell. He appears perfectly normal, maybe a bit nondescript. He breathes motionlessly, gazing forward down the stairs. She wonders what he could possibly want, what he might be thinking. She remembers …
Useless Gestures
by Luke Fegenbush “I don’t know why I do the things I do. It feels like an accident, but I’m just the way I am. People hate it. I don’t want to impress anyone. I just want to be and I can’t even do that.” His knees were up by his chest in a defensive gesture, with his shoes on the coffee table, nudging the box of tissues aside. The boy's name was Jace and, due to him being twenty-something, I afforded him a little self-loathing before I stepped in. I let the evening’s late-spring …
Hang on, St. Christopher
by Margaret Elysia Garcia His proposition arrived as a notification from a kink dating site she’d eagerly signed up for and then promptly forgot. His message came between a reminder for her annual colonoscopy, and an announcement that her insurance premium was increasing, along with several ads by her favorite shoe designer which she, of course, opened first. Christopher was not a stranger to her—she’d met both him and his wife at a BDSM convention in Los Angeles back when Monica thought …