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 …
by Marco Etheridge The sailing ketch Siren’s Call rides her anchor chain in a remote cove off the Sea of Cortez. Warm water laps her wooden hull. Jack Darris, the skipper, first mate, and cabin boy, laps lukewarm whiskey. He watches the last rays of sunlight dip below the ragged Baja horizon while pondering the merits of another whiskey. He does not think long. Jack fishes the last ice fragments from the cooler beside his deck chair. Splashes whiskey into the glass. Most of the ice …
by Ben Reed Roger and I were at the beach when the fog came in. We had just finished eating. Everyone on the sand stopped what they were doing to marvel at the density and opacity of the fog, and how quickly the white mist rolled toward us over the water. And then all at once, we were in motion. Roger and I packed up our things. Mothers snapped at older …
by Ella Schmidt I was practicing softness and gentleness in the bathroom mirror, waiting for shame to take hold and make use of me. Jamie called again to allege that I had, in the span of two years, incurred a sixty-dollar fine in his name for failing to return A Dictionary of Color Combinations to the Pulaski library.I’d been on my knees with a man in the upstairs walkway of a motor inn, making a video on his phone while my friends slept on the other side of the door. We got a room in …