A chronological archive of short stories published in Cleaver’s quarterly literary issues from 2013 to present.

THE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT by Hannah Smart
Hannah SmartTHE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT “Hello, I’d like to report a fire at the Gerry’s Pizza off West Ninth Street.” “Okay, and your name, sir?” “Gerry Parker.” “Could you describe the situation?” “I am seated in the restaurant parking lot about twenty feet from the double-paned glass door customers use to enter the building. The flames have moved through the restaurant and are threatening to enter the liminal buffer space between the two sets of doors leading to the outside and inside of the restaurant, respectively—the area where guests wipe off their boots and queue to be seated on particularly ...
A MAN'S REACH SHOULD EXCEED HIS GRASP by J. Bradley Minnick
J. Bradley MinnickA MAN'S REACH SHOULD EXCEED HIS GRASP My mother arranged for us to walk to school together. I didn't want to go to school; and, I especially didn't want to walk anywhere with Kate Wheeler. Kate Wheeler was my next-door neighbor. She was as persistent as she was pretty, as forthright as she was forceful. She had no shame, and I had so much. She appeared at my front door on the first day of 1st grade and rang the bell. No one ever came to the front door or rang the bell. My mother opened the door ...
THE LOVE by Monique Danielle
Monique Danielle THE LOVE Robin and I arrive at the restaurant at the same time. Today is her thirty-second birthday and she’s chosen The Love, one of her late father’s favorites and the last restaurant we’d eaten at together. She reminds me how he’d loved the starkness of its exposed brick walls, the warmth of its wooden tables, and the heart, perfectly branded into the center of its Loveburger’s bun. Minus her slightly poppy eyes and perfect curves, she is her father’s spitting image: tall, slender, dark skin with a mahogany undertone. She’d been a freshman at Cheyney University when ...
STAY ON THE LINE by Richie Zaborowske
Richie ZaborowskeSTAY ON THE LINE A tornado of nurses blew in. The whole maternity care team. Cracking commands. Swirling around. Wheeling your wife away. And when you stood to follow, they told you, no. To wait, and not worry.  So now you're waiting. You're worrying. Pacing the room. Scrolling on your phone. Looking out the windows to where great gusts of snow are detonating across the parking lot in explosions of shimmering particles that whip past the wind-whipped humps of powder on the vehicles and are already obscuring the footprints of the solitary figure, bundled in a blue parka, wearing ...
SONG OF THE REDWOODS by David Waters
David Waters SONG OF THE REDWOODS June Francis fills a bag with perishables from the fridge: milk for his lattes, oat milk for Lucy’s, salad ingredients, a chicken, leftovers, and random stuff, like the twenty-three-ounce bottle of Frank’s Red Hot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce. He adds Lucy’s vodka and his gin because they can never remember if they finished those bottles at the other place. Their goal is to avoid having to go to the grocery store for as long as possible. He stuffs his pills into his toiletries bag and throws it, along with a few clothes, into a ...
FREEDOM TRAIL by Joshua Ambre
Joshua AmbreFREEDOM TRAIL In front of the visitor center, our tour guide adjusts his breeches. They’re slightly too tight to be family-friendly, but I’m relieved to have something to look at besides old buildings for the next hour. I watch him hitch them up a final time, the hem of his blue frock coat barely concealing the bulge. Beside me, my sister nudges me on the elbow. I grin at her, anticipating a lewd and hilarious aside, but all she does is point at Craig feeding a Nutri-Grain bar to a squirrel. I fake a smile while she snaps his ...
RETROSPECTIVE by Marie Manilla
Marie ManillaRETROSPECTIVE Lena skids around the backseat as the cabbie rudely shifts lanes. Her gnarled knuckles couldn’t negotiate the seatbelt. The tunnel engulfs her, the hum and grrr. The weight of all that earth compressing her brain. But they emerge and she breathes and there’s Pittsburgh’s skyline, looking much as Lena remembers. What she can see of it, anyway. Astigmia frays city lights into fireworks that rain down on her. Sparks pebble her wrap, her skirt. She brushes them off, sending embers into the footwell. Years ago, Edmund had lauded her imaginings until he didn’t.  Traffic is congested around the ...
ENSENADA by Ellie J. Anderson
Ellie J. Anderson ENSENADA Teri and Hal drove past the leaning cardboard shacks of Tijuana to a large old hotel at Estero Beach. They’d been separated for eight months and Hal had been living with a woman named Marilyn. He came home one day, said he'd made a mistake and wanted their marriage to work. He wanted to take a trip. Teri thought the trip might be a good idea. She hadn’t been able to come to grips with her grief over the lost marriage. And she hadn’t been able to get a job. If they were getting back together, ...
Drunk In the Graveyard by Robert Nazar Arjoyan
Robert Nazar Arjoyan DRUNK IN THE GRAVEYARD Jesus Christ ticked off each push-up while Neil Young sang about a man and a maid. Raffi’s hands reddened with strain and weight, flushing redder in a slant shaft of summer sun. The golden cross chained around his corded neck rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell, holy corners chipping the old hardwood of his childhood bedroom with every metronomic rep. His throat was a cauldron of grunts lidded shut by the tight line of his mouth. Raffi hit his hundred and collapsed dead to the world just as Neil’s next ...
DINNER IS AT SEVEN-THIRTY by David Jack Sparks
David Jack SparksDINNER IS AT SEVEN-THIRTY  She opens the apartment door and frowns a smile at him, looks him up and down, holding onto the edge of the door as if she hasn’t yet decided whether to let him in. “You look nice.” He steps in from the hall and holds his arms out and does a one-eighty and back. Gauzy white dress shirt, untucked, sleeves rolled up a couple of turns. Levis, black Oxfords. Wet-gelled hair, hand-spiked, thawing out in the radiator heat. “All set?” he says with light irony. “Are you kidding?” She shuts and deadbolts the door, ...
CONFESSIONS by Micah Muldowney
Micah Muldowney CONFESSIONS  It is a full moon tonight, but she has yet to clear the colinas of Salina Cruz. She might not crest at all; they are high and stark, almost walls, and the valley is very thin, almost a ravine except there is no river. In daylight, the colinas hang thin in the air like sheets on a line, almost weightless. The wind might catch them. But now that it is night, there is a weight to them, and their shadows welter in the streets. Making my way through the dark, I think—and not for the first time—that ...
THE BODY by Isabel Cristina Legarda
Isabel Cristina Legarda  THE BODY During class the Body would lie still like the other cadavers, submitting mutely to the students’ scrutiny. On the first day, the students tried to hide their fear under façades of bravado. Gallows humor betrayed their nerves. It didn’t take long for apprehension to be replaced by morbid fascination, and then, when exams were near, resentment of the tedium and demands of their tiny labors. One afternoon, late in the day, one of the students, the Boy with the Long Black Hair, entered the anatomy lab to cram for a practical exam. He stopped in ...
ZENITH by Cody Shrum
Cody Shrum ZENITH Four of them were out that night: two brothers and a couple. They’d been howling at the moon, driving around, being kids—senior year, winter break. Wattles Road was just outside town, nobody around to bother them. The sky hanging over the town was dull gray, its belly full of snow. The old car’s heater wasn’t worth a shit, so the cab was full of breath. Rock music blasted from the stereo, speakers huffing static. The older brother, the senior, tapped the song’s tune on the steering wheel. The car edged to the shoulder of the road where ...
LINA AND NINA by Elizabeth Brus
Elizabeth Brus LINA AND NINA When I sucked on Tiana, pulling the skin up in my mouth like Fiona told me you do it, it left a mark that was darker than even her skin was, black against brown like a blob of mud. Her skin felt different than mine too, creamy and smelled, not in a gross way but smelled like mine didn’t. I told my mom she smelled different, and my mom said I shouldn’t tell anyone that because it wasn’t right to say. I said, well, it’s true, and she said, Jasmine, do not let me catch ...
HOME AWAY FROM HOME by Cecile Callan
Cecile Callan HOME AWAY FROM HOME  Into the sleek metal shaker went the whiskey, Frangelico, white crème de cacao, heavy cream. The bartender reached for an egg—crack—and slid the yellow orb from shell to shell as the white jiggled slithery down. She leaned across the bar, arms folded snug beneath her breasts making soft mounds under her green sweater, and opened her mouth. He slid the yolk in, she accepted, swallowed and smiled. Vigorously now he shook the contents as she watched the muscles in his upper arms push against the tight white of his shirt sleeves. He turned to ...
THE BANKRUPT CIRCUS by J. Bradley Minnick
J. Bradley MinnickTHE BANKRUPT CIRCUS Before the Bankrupt Circus came to town, my bud, Decie, and I spent our summer lunch breaks arguing about the merits of olive loaf sandwiches while we sat on the curb in the midst of chores in front of his mother’s house—a squat typical one-story brick affair—two eleven-year-old boys caught in the grip of the summer lunch-time economic blahs. Remember olive loaf? It’s a working man’s lunch meat: one-part salty bologna, one-part salty olives, a third-part salty preservatives—a super salty concoction that went down perfectly with cold orange sodas in pull-tab cans. Thus, during our ...
SUNK BY MINES by Tom Sokolowski
Tom SokolowskiSUNK BY MINES Driving to Cascades Park, I pass The Florida Bar and the Smokey Hollow Commemoration and Community Garden where, on a bench facing Franklin Boulevard, Lonely Man, with a knapsack beside him, is always grinding rotten kumquats under his sneakers. Today, Lonely Man is squishing a fat one. He’s always looking like the loneliest man in the world. I barely compete. Especially since I have a date. Lonely Man becomes tiny in my rearview. I hit the light at Lafayette, loop around to Suwanee, and street park in front of The Edison—a square brick building with big ...
FIVE SECONDS by Matthew Burrell
Matthew BurrellFIVE SECONDS J.D. stood up without his grenade pin. We were heading toward the Guadalupe range after a live fire exercise in White Sands Training Grounds, otherwise known as the ‘Sand Box’, during a hot afternoon in July 1998 when the last guardpost of safety that kept us living, breathing connected tissue instead of imploded molecules of gelatinous red goop, the grenade clip, caught on J.D.’s entrenching tool, discharging into the air, and afterward, Ramirez swore he could hear the material ignition over the clanging of everything else—all the battle rattle, entrenching tools, canteens, compasses, magazines, warm brass shell ...
THE ACTIVIST IN THE NURSING HOME by Pat Ryan
Pat RyanTHE ACTIVIST IN THE NURSING HOME It was Monday morning, a few minutes shy of noon, when I entered the Visitors’ Room of the extended care facility where I was embedded. The room is square and high-ceilinged, with a round table in the center for magazines. Beyond the table is the outside door, which is unlocked from noon to four p.m. The door handle beckons seductively, and yet I know that no one can enter or exit discreetly. The door’s unoiled mechanisms, no matter how gently manipulated, shudder when opened and crash when closed. The one window in the ...
HELL’S MOUNTAIN by Brendan Stephens
Brendan StephensHELL’S MOUNTAIN Long ago, after I died, I found myself alone in a vast wasteland with nothing on the horizon except a single imposing mountain gray with distance. This wasn’t paradise. I’d never been a believer, just an ordinary sinner. Beside me lay a tightly-coiled nylon rope, a pouch full of chalk, pitons, a climbing hammer, and a rock climbing harness in the dried-out clay, the waist belt covered in carabiners. No explanation was necessary; I was supposed to make my way up the ice-capped peak, so far away. From where I stood, it had to be at least ...
YOUR BEST IMPRESSION by Lauren Baker
Lauren BakerYOUR BEST IMPRESSION OF AN EARNEST MAN There was a Post-it with a heart drawn on it stuck to my desktop computer. I folded the paper square into halves, fourths, and eighths and scratched at the residue it left on the screen. Another heart on orange paper rested on a banana peel and half a protein bar in the trash can. I thought Daniel was behind the Post-its; one of my coworkers mentioned she thought he’d miss me. The notes started after I put in my two weeks, and my time was almost up. The job was supposed to ...
DISTRACTED by Pat Jameson
Pat JamesonDISTRACTED That afternoon was the afternoon I followed the starlings across town and accosted a distracted driver, but before that, me and the other irregulars were at Joe’s explaining to a new recruit how you could tell whether you were irregular or not. The kid’s name was Eddie. He was a nice guy, a veteran, a fucking hero or something in the machine gun nest. Not long ago he’d suffered a wound, won a Purple Heart, but now he was down here in the gutters filled with daytime whiskey and beer, and we felt it was best to bring ...
SAHARA DREAMS by A. J. Jacono
A. J. JaconoSAHARA DREAMS The first night of the tour, after the guides had hitched the camels and secured the mess tent and laid out the steaming tagines and plates of couscous, Cash decided to make some friends because he hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in days and sat with two people from either New Zealand or Australia. One of them held out a hairy hand and introduced himself as Reeky; the woman with him, he said, was Queen. “Super hot today, wasn’t it?” said Ricky. “Sweated out half my body weight by noon.” Quinn squinted at him, said, “No ...
THE PHANTOM BABY by A. C.
A. C.THE PHANTOM BABY The baby dies on garbage day. It’s a Monday, very cloudy, with a sixteen percent chance of rain. There’s a little cough, a little spit, then nothing. The collection truck comes on time. It was not a Monday when the baby first revealed itself—in my table drawer, wrapped in something now a far cry from my best cloth. The police found it hard to believe that the baby in my house wasn’t mine. It didn’t help there was no documentation of that time it had happened to my grandmother. Only after I offered my birth canal ...
THE TATTOO by Wendy MacIntyre
Wendy MacIntyreTHE TATTOO Wita’s mother had a tattoo that colonized her left forearm. Six words, sinister and enigmatic: “Keep me safe and kill me.” The dyes that needled this sentence into her flesh were sea-green and Prussian blue. Wita was sure she had an infant memory of trying to clutch at the shimmering sea-green stuff beneath the bath water where her mother held her snug. What had she thought the tattoo was? Pretty. Dazzling. A fish perhaps? But she was then not long out of the womb and did not know what a fish was, or even how to distinguish ...
PARAÍSO by Mark Williams
Mark WilliamsPARAÍSO Henry Hoover is in his bedroom, mastering the G-chord on his Martin acoustic, when his father walks in and brings up Science Camp. With Henry’s sophomore year of high school behind him and all of summer ahead, he couldn’t care less about Science Camp. “You need to expand your horizon, young man,” says Henry’s dad, giving the Martin a thump. Henry thinks there is no horizon to expand. It’s filled with coal dust and shit. We’re toast. He almost says something about his father’s horizon (he’s an orthodontist) but instead asks, “If I go to Science Camp, will you buy ...
SHUTTING DOWN by Thomas Johnson
Thomas JohnsonSHUTTING DOWN Stevie watched the road. Driving right now made him nervous. Cars moved tightly in each direction on the highway. Stevie’s wife, Ruth, was next to him in the passenger seat, and their friend, Helen, shared the backseat with the dog. Everyone sat in silence, Stevie driving, the others thumbing a phone. Stevie tried to concentrate. “So many more cars than I expected for a Sunday,” said Stevie. Helen spoke up from the rear seat. “Normal for this part of the country.” Stevie started to say, “Maybe it just feels crowded because of,” but he trailed off. “Whatever ...
RED SUN by Mary Lewis
Mary LewisRED SUN Using the full twelve-foot length of the handle, Jake pushed the floater over the last slab of new concrete, then pulled it slowly back towards him. This was his favorite part of the job because after all the heavy work of ground preparation, framing, pouring, leveling, and compacting, he could watch the new surface turn glossy and smooth under his touch. Daryl could have done it, he was as good at it as Jake, but as the business owner he liked to give himself the pleasure. Daryl could start the cleanup while he had these moments to ...
VILLAINS by Samantha Neugebauer
Samantha NeugebauerVILLAINS Back then it was impossible to do anything with my mother sleeping. In the evenings, we watched Prancer and ate turkey clubs; in the mornings, we drank coffee, then Bloody Marys. It was when I worked in the afternoons that she liked to sleep, so I schemed to thwart her efforts (although I did celebrate her condition in the abstract). I’d give her small tasks; send her out for a forever stamp, or to Dunkin' Donuts, or to pick up her prescriptions, things like that. My bank account had become anorexic, so we kept our overhead low. It ...
RANDOM PRECISION by Caleb Murray
Caleb MurrayRANDOM PRECISION I woke up in the morning with a hemorrhage in my brain that made me think that life is some kind of nightmare even though, logically, such a state of affairs would be irrelevant to life—after all, if life is a dream, or if there is no such thing as reality (there is and there isn’t, as it were), it would make no difference to how we think about practical matters. Through the kitchen window I saw my neighbor, a heavy woman with dark hair, standing in the road with a black blob in one hand and ...
THE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER by Kelly Pedro
Kelly PedroTHE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER The baby shower was on a Sunday, a day that was supposed to be about peace and rest, but Connie felt anything but peaceful or restful. Her hips still ached from a terrible night’s sleep. The body pillow she draped her leg over at night was no use. And now she waddled around a conference room in the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville like a rusty can opener, stilted and slow, but still getting the job done. The job today was to be sweet and smiling, grateful and, mostly, surprised, even though her mother ...
FIRST CHOICE by Hannah Felt Garner
Hannah Felt GarnerFIRST CHOICE It is fall break when we arrive on campus for the interview. No one around but the student workers in Admissions and a security guard in a golf cart, silently cruising under heritage elms. My father and I have just toured a more prestigious college nearby when he announces this little detour on our drive home. I resist but only a little, sick already of a process which will later give me hives. Twice: the day of the December deadline, then again the week leading up to the one in January. My body is leaning as ...
MELT by Candice Morrow
Candice MorrowMELT A record high, the porch thermometer reads one hundred and nine, and your father sleeps naked without even a sheet. You left for college yesterday, and I suppose this means, among other things, that we can sprawl exposed for the rest of our lives. Fuck. From the freezer I take a Popsicle rocket pop, a kitchen staple since you were three. Grocery lists on the refrigerator door read milk, eggs, bread, and, in your tiny, scrunched cursive: rockets. I set the sprinklers and sit by the window to watch water spray out from the dark, hit and roll ...
HOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE by Andrew Vincenzo Lorenzen
Andrew Vincenzo LorenzenHOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE YOUR ASHES ARE EVERYWHERE. You don’t know how to smoke a cigar. I’m going to teach you tonight. I shouldn’t—but I will. Here, hold it like this, see? Between your thumb and index finger, like that, see? Isn’t that better, hm? Now, you dab the edge of it in the ashtray, like that, perfect. It’s tidier that way. Don’t cough like I do. You’re too young to cough like I do. Normally, they don’t let you smoke in here. Normally, I wouldn’t be talking so much. Normally, well there’s not much normal anymore, ...
HAUNTING VIVIAN by Amy Savage
Amy SavageHAUNTING VIVIAN The first ex to haunt Vivian waits until she’s left her bar stool to use the restroom. On return, she finds his embossed business card cowering next to her martini, the bumpy letters of his name like chocolate-covered ants, striving to entice but making her skin crawl. She quickly scans the crowd, but his bald arrogant head is nowhere to be seen. That white shiny orb of a skull that had drawn her like a moth to a flame. Vivian texts her friend Kelly, who’d nursed her back to life when he’d cheated, who’d urged Vivian to ...
FAVOR by Kim Magowan
Kim MagowanFAVOR Liam, Emailing because I just heard that you and Genevieve split up, so I wanted to reach out and say—well, I was going to say how sorry I am. But that isn’t entirely truthful. At any rate, I’m here if you need me. Divorce, ugh: been there, done that. And I will also say that personally, I didn’t find it helpful when people would say mean things about Jim, thinking that in so doing they were being supportive. But all that did was make me feel shitty and question my own judgement. Like, was I supposed to thank ...
OFF by Suphil Lee Park
Suphil Lee ParkOFF You wake up in complete darkness. It is the kind of darkness that strikes you as a jolt of realization that you’ve never found yourself in complete darkness up until that very moment, not that terrifying night at a cabin nestled deep in the Norwegian woods, not when every ion of light is strangled out of an airtight, soundproof Broadway theatre just before a burst of spotlight, and not even that one time you crawled into a washer full of dirty laundry during a hide-and-seek turned competitive sports and fell asleep. The first thought that hits you, ...
ZOLOFT NANNY by Madeleine Gavaler
Madeleine GavalerZOLOFT NANNY Red drips down Dasha’s chin as I watch her through the playground bars. I hold my phone a distance from my cheek, giving my voice air to wade through before making its way to some faraway woman at a desk who doesn’t know why none of the meds work on me. “Zoloft made me want to kill myself, so actually I would not like to keep taking it.” I press the sound of her between my shoulder and face, the way suburban moms do when they’re busy cleaning but still have to talk to their friend Nancy—women ...
BIRTHING LESSONS by Rebecca Ackermann
Rebecca AckermannBIRTHING LESSONS The woman on the screen howls in agony and communion as her partner reaches into the water to grasp their child’s crown and pull him free. They are all three naked, swirling in blood and insides. Sunlight pours in from a round window above the blue-tiled tub. All three cry, the woman and her partner whisper a few words to each other, then the screen cross-fades with a video of the ocean before it turns black. “Does that bathroom come with the class fee?” jokes the pregnant woman in the multi-colored jumpsuit from the other side of ...
THE SOFT ANIMALS by Nathan Willis
Nathan WillisTHE SOFT ANIMALS There are four deer in the garage. They’re made of metal and they don’t have heads. Mom’s been sneaking out at night when she thinks I’m asleep. This is what she’s been working on. She wants to take them to the craft show, but she can’t get them in the trailer by herself. They’re too big. There’s a utility bucket in the corner with the leftover pieces she didn’t use. I tell her I’ll help in the morning and take the bucket. On my way upstairs, I stop in the dining room, where we keep Dad ...
THE UNDERCURRENT by Mariana Sabino
Mariana SabinoTHE UNDERCURRENT The Czech woman had returned to the wrong place, that much we knew, and we weren’t about to watch out for anyone, especially this pearl smeared with oil. She arrived in one of the local public vans, not in her own car as you would expect. Taking the van could only mean money was scarce. She stepped onto the street in front of our bar, at the route’s final stop, having trouble with her bulging suitcase. We figured she must be over forty now, her face thin and pale like paper, her hair streaked with long white ...
INTUITION by Maggie Mumford
Maggie MumfordINTUITION 1. An acorn appears. The orb centered on the welcome mat in the curve of the C, the WEL and the OME forming a bracket. I decide the placement is an accident of nature and that this tree part was sent by the combination of a loose stem and a strong wind. I turn the knob on the door I painted green. I step over it and into my house. The soft jazz my husband plays warms the kitchen, where he is cooking potato leek soup. I say, “It’s the strangest thing.” He nods. At this point he ...
NO NAME ISLAND by Lara Markstein
Lara MarksteinNO NAME ISLAND In the beginning, in that first month that they’d lived with their uncle on Aorere Drive as kids, Hamish and Kylie passed whole days in the bay. Before Stuart could go on about the cost of diesel with the lights they left on in every room, they kicked free of the breakfast table and rushed down the hillside into waters that clouded with each step, their feet skimming the soft surface of the earth. Hamish scanned the sea for stingrays, pale sprats, and sea snails with perfect spiral shells. When the tides turned, the bay became ...
URGENT by Gemini Wahhaj
Gemini WahhajURGENT When Polly’s father died, she received an outpouring of love from his friends. She was grieving by not taking any calls—no tears, no ceremony, just silence, and a total loss of appetite—but these were international calls, coming from Bangladesh, in the middle of the night, from strange-looking numbers. Her father had died in Bangladesh. Her mother had died a year before that. Polly was an only child, unmarried, living by herself in faraway Houston, where she knew few Bengalis, certainly not anyone from her parents’ past. She had left home two decades ago for a master’s degree in ...
EXTRA CREDIT by Colette Parris
Colette ParrisEXTRA CREDIT The three of us together constitute a smidge of impurity in what would otherwise be an unadulterated cup of salt. Not the Himalania Fine Pink Salt that will run you $8.99 for ten ounces at Whole Foods. (That’s right. I just googled the price of pink salt at Whole Foods, because I’m all about precision. And while I was at it, I checked to see if gluten-free blueberry waffles are back in stock. Alas, no.) I mean the regular iodized salt that you can get for less than a dollar at Target, the salt that comes in ...
RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT by Charlotte Moretti
Charlotte MorettiRUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT She chewed on a jagged piece of skin that she had pulled along her thumbnail as she drove, her right wrist dangling limply on the steering wheel. She drove quickly as she snuck glances at me—sharp, suspicious looks. I watched through a shaft of sunlight coming in from the windshield as dust billowed in through the open windows of the Jeep and settled, lazy and drifting, on my lap. Her arm was freckled like I remembered, but now the skin was loose, bunching and drooping. I wanted to touch it, to lift it up back ...
THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS by Michelle Ross
Michelle RossTHE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS Andrew It was a mini fridge, so not much. Also, it was college, so mostly beer most of the time until we drank those Heineken, one by one winnowing down to whatever else remained: a package of sliced extra sharp cheddar; a Yoplait with its silver, reflective seal that you peel off, making me think of Andrew’s tube of anti-itch cream; a crinkly plastic bag holding a few wrinkled, mushy green grapes. “Are you going to eat those?” I asked him that afternoon. Unless we were making out, I sat on Andrew’s desk ...
MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES by Eric Rasmussen
Eric RasmussenMEANINGFUL DEPARTURES I. McKenzie sees it coming. The party’s host is drunk: she’s laughing loud, touching everyone nearby, gesturing with the knife she’s using to cut whole pickles into spears for bloody marys. McKenzie should say something or take the knife, but this woman is the boss of the guy she came with. By the time the host raises the blade again, it’s too late. Her pinky is in the exact wrong place. McKenzie tries to yell, but her synapses can’t work that fast. The woman slams the knife down and cuts off most of her finger. Besides the thunk, ...
N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 by AJ Strosahl
AJ StrosahlN ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 A monster named Ogopogo lived in Lake Okanagan and Sylvester’s father Clyde had once seen it drown a bear, face first. It happened a few years before Sylvester was born, when Clyde was almost a boy himself. Clyde told Sylvester that it happened as these things do, which is to say: out of nowhere, on an unremarkable day. Clyde was fishing for perch on a stretch of shore where you could wade in, waist-deep, with your feet anchored in the silty lake bed. It was late in the day, with the sun high and the air ...
THE OTHER SIDE by Ann Stoney
Ann StoneyTHE OTHER SIDE When you wake up in the night, don’t flush or wash your hands. Go straight back to bed. This helps. You’ve been awake on and off. Dreams take the shape of lightning. Exaggerated versions of yourself, they crash unexpectedly, then fade away—a tide that rips, then spits you on the shore of waking. You think of tomorrow. You’ll divide the day into three parts: (1) a business activity, something practical, (2) a bit of exercise, (3) something creative, whatever that is. But when tomorrow comes, you fill the day with useless things and once again are ...

Everyone-Means-So-Well