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 …
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 …
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 …
by Vaibhavi Kerkar Your roommate’s voice is as tender as a fresh wound when she offers to pay you two favours in exchange of accompanying her to a funeral. When you ask her whose funeral it is,she hooks her fingers on your collarbones and presses down until your knees buckle. Shepoints to an ex-lover’s name scalpeled in the nook between her heel and her ankle, the woundhaloed red around the deep …
by Dana Diehl The first time it happened, Lana was standing in front of a shop window, trying to see past her reflection to the business inside. She doesn’t remember anything special about the moment, but suddenly her insides were collapsing into themselves and the Styrofoam cup of coffee was pulled out of her hands and she dropped to her knees, gasping, everything around her taut and bright. The feeling passed quickly, so quickly that for a moment she wondered if she’d imagined it. But …
by Morgan Hobbs I still mailed them in, even though mail had long since given way to email, which itself had been replaced several times over by more technologically advanced systems. I still mailed them, even though there was nobody left to read the mail, much less deliver it. Kind of like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out into the ocean. I still wrote everything by hand in a notebook and typed it out later on an electric typewriter that always seemed to …