We settled on the gay neighborhood, my wife Jessie and I, because it was familiar. My older brother had lived in Berlin in the 1980s, on Goltzstraße, down the block from Café M, one of Bowie’s haunts during his epoch-making years there. I remember my first pilgrimage to the bar, marveling at the way grizzled, veteran drunks perched themselves at the same wobbly, tin tables as second-hand-styled teens—leathery, habit-driven creatures of the savannah quenching their thirst …
NOBODY WANTS TO DIE
The midday cockcrow found me in the kitchen cleaning the mackerels, popularly known as Titus fish, that I had bought from the market. On the white deep freezer in the corner sat my small radio, tuned to a music station. I jiggled my hips with the ease of a palm tree swaying in the wind, my feet tapping on the tiles like a drummer marking time to Angélique Kidjo’s “Wombo Lombo” drifting toward me. It was a warm Saturday afternoon, the kind that pulled men out of their houses to perch on …
Miss Mayfield
“Lock your chair.” Tugging the edge of a bouffant mahogany wig with one hand while with the other fondling the folds of an emerald green jersey she’d paired with canary-yellow slacks, Sadie Mayfield replied, “Honestly, I lack the mo-ti-vay-shun.” “But we talked about this. Your goal was to walk down these stairs on a Sunday morning, get in the car, and be back in church.” “Oh yes, dear, I do, I do need to be in the lair of the Lord, but phys-ically I cannot.” …
Interview With Dana Diehl
Dana Diehl is an author and educator based in Southern Arizona. Her upcoming collection of short stories, The Earth Room, has won the 2024 Hudson Prize, and two of the stories in this book, "The Woman Through the Door" and "Quicksand," were published in Invisible City. Her other notable works include Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018) and TV Girls (New Delta Review, 2018). She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State …
The Look
by Michael C. Roberts Mr. Benson looked at me down the dinner table with a face, not like I had ever gotten before. I knew the look was different. It was not a look adults give to kids. Not a corrective look like from my third-grade teacher, peering over her glasses, when I talked without raising my hand; not bemused censuring from my father when I farted in church causing my older brother to snicker; not proud like my mother when I recited memorized poetry; not the tearfully sad look when …
Hey, Boogle
by Natalie Mead The tent is gray and orange—gray like the color of my face after a long bout of vomiting, or of my favorite wire-free bra after years of abuse and few washes. The orange is the sturdy International Orange of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is the same orange my friend Vivian wants to paint her house. The light coming through my living room window makes the gray tent fabric glow yellow, like the rotten-banana bruises in the crooks of my elbows. My husband Cory set up the …