AFTER DONNIE DARKO by Megan Magers As the water spilled through the spout overhead, she replayed the idea again and again. A constant rush of thought, unbroken and hot. Don’t worry. You got away with it. She imagined scattering herself across the bottom of the tub, letting the soap residue wet the jet-lagged parts she’d become, turn them soft. Let them slip down the drain, flood the pipes. But she could only breathe steam and listen to the whirr of the vent. Everything was being recycled right then. Time and life and fear and air. She was there, staring at ...

THREE FLASH PIECES by Mercedes Lawry 1. Was there transposition? Toby wondered why flies always died on their backs, or so it seemed. He had not conducted a scientific analysis or even done research on the suspect Internet. He was fully prepared to admit he’d made up the entire premise, simply because he’d observed a dead fly upon coming out of his bedroom, though he was pretty sure he’d come across other dead flies in this position. He had no idea, really, if the fly had died on that spot or elsewhere, say, the windowsill, where so many did, no ...

A FUNERAL ON THE COMPUTER by Michael Chaney She didn’t know how to tell her aging mother how they were doing it, James and his friends from the team. They were in the living room, snickering in their jerseys, going to that boy’s funeral—digitally. She was in the kitchen at a table with her mother and she knew she wouldn’t be able to convey to her the quadratic equation of the crash trajectory of a car in chrome and plastic, nor would she ace the quiz on tree ecology, about the way the chemical composition of bark repels beer swilling ...

SYNESTHESIA AND YOU by Charnell Peters I hang from the last brick of August, and cold is tolling. I don’t hear you, but I remember your summer breath, and you still feel like the softest blue behind my eyes. The months we spent together sit catty-corner: June and July. July, bent in half, turns to face the other side of black space. Black hums, like the night under the chalk moon when we sweated and swatted at ants. I felt you for the first time, your blue warmth and dimpled back. June woke with us, orange and fiery on our ...

IN THE HEADLIGHTS by Agatha Hinman When he first hears the baby is coming, that she is pregnant and already showing, he leaves second shift at the hospital early, and drives up the road thirty miles to Greeley’s bar where no one knows him, and if they do it’s probably too dark in there to see him. He downs two whiskey sours, takes the beer to a table for sipping. He sees through the plate glass a blue light blinking anonymously -- he can’t see the neon sign itself. Up and down Highway 101 headlights blur in the drizzle. He’s ...

“HALLELUJAH.” COVER BY JEFF BUCKLEY by Liz Breen It was 1994, and she told you that you wouldn’t be ready until at least 1998, The Millennium if you were lucky. “The lyrics are way over your head. It’s not baby stuff,” said your sister, fourteen, cap turned backwards, still three months away from smoking her first joint, wearing a new sports bra under her faded denim overalls. She snatched the cassette tape from your hand, but you found it later in her drawer, tucked underneath the flannel shirt that Tommy Milner had given her, and you put it into the ...

EARLY SPRING RAINSTORM by Jacqueline Doyle I crouch in the desiccated garden at the side of our house, my knees stiff. The withered tomato plants still have a few small orange orbs clinging to them, but the rest of last year’s plants are stubbly and brown. I’ve finally gotten around to pulling out the tomato cages to return to the shed, and now I wonder whether I’ll plant tomatoes again this spring. Newspaper headlines herald more drought in California. Salmon may not spawn this year. Riverbeds are parched and cracked. We talk about water use and precipitation levels and runoff ...

YOUR MOTHER SINGS WHEN SHE’S ALONE by Cathy Ulrich Your mother loves to sing. She only does it when no one else is around. She says I’ve got a terrible voice, and you believe it. Your mother never says anything she doesn’t think is true. When you asked your mother why is the sky blue, she didn’t know the answer. She thought she might have asked her own parents when she was a child. She thought maybe every child did it. She said she didn’t know, science maybe, and said a more pressing question was what if my blue isn’t ...

HUSH, PUPPIES by Catherine Nichols The vet returned my call as I was rolling the last wineglass in bubble wrap. In counterpoint to my curt hello, he sounded upbeat, even jovial. He explained that when Mags had been spayed last month, the operation had sent her hormones haywire. “That’s why she’s behaving like she’s pregnant,” he summed up. “It’s a textbook case.” The “textbook case” was curled beside the stove in a cardboard box she had commandeered during my week of packing. She’d stuffed it with laundry from the overflowing hamper. Each time I approach, she whined. “It’s all in ...

TELL-TALE by Nancy Hightower I remember hearing the beating of God’s heart. Th-thump, th-thump th-thump. I swore it to be a holy thing. My father held me tight and said let that rhythm guide you, son. Cha-cha-cha. Th-thump, th-thump th-thump. The living room spun into hallejulahs as he swiveled and swayed his hips, hand on stomach, eyes closed. Lips easing into a smile. Lawrence Welk crooned from the television to keep those toes tapping. My father listened, sashayed though life hips, pressed against my mother, my friends, my daughter. It’s a holy holy thing, son. Cha-cha-cha. I shut my eyes, ...

WILLIE: PREMONITION by Heather Jones When Lucy and me go down by the river the moonlight in her long blonde curls. You can’t trust no one near no shining hair like that I tell her no one should touch them long blonde curls. She laughs at me I’d be mad but for the sound of her laugh at night like when the sun and the moon sit in the sky at the same time. She laughs she holds her hair between her lily white fingers she says I can touch it. I want to. Go ahead go ahead go ahead ...

AT THE BEACH by Debra S. Levy When they pull in, the lot is crowded. In the distance, the sun begins descending behind a curtain of wispy clouds. Water roils onto the sand and seagulls and plovers retreat to dry land. But the water recedes they jay-walk back onto the glistening surface, picking off lake flies and dead minnows. The sun is a pink iris closing on a dappled blue-black sky. Rest assured the world will come to an apocryphal end. You should never count your chickens before they fly the coop. “I want a good tan,” the girl with ...

KISS by Paul Kavanagh She called me into the front room and told me to sit down in the comfy chair and then she leaned over and kissed me and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me ...

ZUMBA FEVER by Nadia Laher Saturday at Zumba there was a new song, one with a thumping electronic beat. Marie hated when there were new songs. She still had difficulty learning the routines they did every week, mastering such simple moves as simultaneously throwing her right arm in the air and kicking her left foot up. The instructor, Sierra, bopped around at the front of the room, clapping her hands together. “It’s a new song, ladies! Time to jive!” Marie could feel sweat sticking to her back underneath the big white t-shirt and loose black capris she wore. She’d found ...

BANGLE by Gabriel Thibodeau When she wears the bangle she feels so fucking good. Just look how it hoops her wrist like one of Saturn’s rings, how it knocks back and forth as she waves her hand, points at things. She’s hot shit when she wears the bangle. She was wearing the bangle when she met the boy and hooked the boy and used him and used him and dropped him. He looked so small when she dropped him, like she’d shrunk him in half, like she was Saturn and he was some little moon. She’d been the moon a ...

FIVE FLASH PIECES by Emily Grelle 1. Shell of an Aphrodisiac Lathered in shampoo, her hair became like sea foam embracing knotted driftwood, limbs exfoliating on the shore. Her flesh was turning pink from such long exposure to the shower head’s hot prick, and the moon’s white hot eye lit up with the glee of a voyeur, peeping through darkness at a celestial body in motion. Razor in hand, she mutilated every hair that dared leave its follicle inside her. She had no room in her life for hairy situations, and she inwardly thanked the shower for demanding that she ...

TONY by Elizabeth Alexander We were running through the Shepherd’s Woods down by Yalloway Creek and across from the schoolyard. We were running because Tony had said he wanted to and I had said that that sounded fine, and so we ran. When we reached the Gap, that’s the wide space between one side of the Woods and the other where the ground falls away and you can see the Creek squeeze through rocks at the bottom, I jumped over. Tony stopped and wouldn’t do it, so I said “C’mon Ton—! Don’t be a chicken!” And he hated when I ...

LITTLE ORESTES by Nick Kolakowski When I was a boy, my father told me the story of Agamemnon, King of Argos, peerless butcher of the Trojan War. Agamemnon was arrogant, which Dad considered a sterling quality for a man to have, so long as he backed that shit up with mighty deeds. Dad might have earned a degree from a good college and spent his life building a library of thick books, but sometimes when he drank his speech tumbled back into that crude pit from which nobody in our family will ever escape, dug by generations of pissed-off roughnecks ...

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS by Charlie Keys Bohem His Royal Highness was a tweaker who hung around outside the convenience store where we used to go to buy booze. He always had his hands shoved wrist deep in his pockets, and there was always a twenty four-ounce Miller Hi-Life in a brown paper bag sitting on the newsstand next to him. His face was covered in black, some mixture of sweat and ash that stuck in his stubble, and he wiped it often—long, greasy drags across his cheeks that left them dirtier than they had been before. The management let him ...

Heather BourbeauMELIAI* He knew where to find her, amid the Spanish moss hanging from trees, along the creek the locals called a river. He knew she sought the sensation of being at once small and large. As a girl, she would paddle under the trees and pretend the moss was her hair—long, soft, tangled, and tender. She felt protected, wonderfully alone, even when he would find and bring her home. He knew that after the arrangements were made, the barely-used name shared and honored, the achingly small coffin lowered, she would run to hold moss, feel safe, mourn among her ...

SKIN by GennaRose Nethercott You fall down a cement staircase & your skin drops away. It comes off like a suit. You fold your skin up & carry it home & hang it in the closet. Then you wrap yourself in unfinished quilt tops made up of band tees old lovers once wore. It’s as good a skin as any. For the first few months, you lie on the sofa waiting to heal. Every morning you undress the bandages & smother yourself in antibacterial petroleum jelly. Then you put the quilts back on ...

WE ARE ALIVE AS LONG AS THE SNOW IS DEEP by Ron Burch You pound on the dirty living room window from outside. You want in and I leave the room. Bloodsucker, zombie, cannibal. You tell me that you will take me into the bedroom. You say you will make it worth my time. You just need a hit, a bump. I say I don't have anything. Leave me the fuck alone but you beg. My phone rings. I get email. You seem to be everywhere even though I see your shadow blighting the soiled brown window curtains. You send ...

1973 & 1976 by Paul Enea 1973 Leo is lying face up on a mattress in a walk-in closet. The entrance is missing a door so a purple wool blanket, suspended from two nails, serves as a flap that keeps out the light but not the noise ...

A RAIN OF SOUND by William L. Alton My father and I sit on the steps of the house, the house I grew up in, watching snow fall and melt. A scrim of ice laces the yard with white ribbons. The street throws back diamonds under the lamp posts. I’m cold and my father loans me his sweater, the sleeves too long, the chest too wide. I can smell the acrid reek of his cigarettes on the weave ...

Ingrid Claire WenzlerA REPLACEMENT On a narrow street in Berlin, all cobblestones, I remember turning, seeing first, the morning light on the rubble someone had swept against the curb and then, a child alone in a doorway. “What’s that you have?” our second lieutenant called out. The child, a little German girl with fine brown hair, looked over and in this sweet, sort of hesitant way waved. I have a hard time, even now, believing what happened after that. The lieutenant went over to the little girl and grabbed the doll she was holding. “I asked you a question,” he ...

Chris VolaTHE TERRIBLE SOFTNESS OF TONGUES How has it come to this, he would think, watching the images that flickered, MRI-slow, from the screen on his blanket-covered stomach. Regardless of how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep my shit together. Fundamentally, he knew you couldn’t keep any kind of shit together. Everything was carbon and particles smaller than carbon and those particles were always corroding, breaking, collapsing against each other with the terrible softness of tongues. A rapid, infinite sequence of shifts that didn’t stop and were at once fragile and impenetrably brutal. If he felt a pang of ...

CHRISTMAS LIGHTS IN A TOWN WITH A POPULATION OF 500 by Neil Boyack In the flat, heavy heat, I was walking home from the Christmas dinner in our small country town with my wife. There was a cool change trying to affect the heatwave that had made everyone sweat and complain for the past week and as a result there were muscles of blustery wind, and random flashes of lightning tailed by crunching thunder; a thunder that really never ended, a continual electric sound like a large concrete ball rolling around on the wooden floor of an old Scout Hall ...

SHARPIE by Jason Newport Rowena moves the side of the Sharpie gradually down the bridge of my nose, taking a turn over my nostrils and across my lips. I pucker. The Sharpie glides around the bulge. I try to see the mark on the wall. “Don’t,” she commands, pressing my chin back into place so the Sharpie can complete its journey around my jaw and along my Adam’s apple. When the line ends, she lets me step back with her to look. My amorous silhouette graces the ladies’ room wall in Harp’s Bar. We’ve already done Rowena’s outline in the ...

EMERGENCIES, IN THE EVENT OF by Melissa Ostrom You cannot outrun it. Stand and wave both fists. Hide your palms. Speak softly. If it charges, curl up on your side, tuck in your head and project beach ball harmlessness. Feel free to breathe. This is no respiratory contagion. But avoid open sores and exchanging bodily fluids. Maybe cancel your trip ...

Shannon SweetnamMACARONS We were in the Clotted Cow when we got the call. “I found four thermometers, but they’re all rectal,” Dad shouted over the phone. “Rectal?” I asked, as I licked buttercream frosting off my fingers. “What do you mean rectal?" “Hold on.” There was a long pause. I could tell he was waiting for me to repeat my question. Our son was thirteen. Our daughter was twenty. We hadn’t had a rectal thermometer in the house in over a decade. I was not going to repeat my question. Jim and I were in Toronto for our twenty-fifth wedding ...

Alicia L. GleasonDEADBOLT I always end up back at the apartment on 12th street. We moved in on a dim Saturday morning. Remember how you found that kinked key in the cabinet beneath the sink? A key someone before us had bent? You fell ill with interest in the house’s previous owners. In how they got in and got out, in where the key fit. You tried all the locks. You searched in the cobwebbed cellar while I soaped the kitchen floors. I’ll bet this was with a hammer, you said when you came out, holding the key with two ...

Melanie SevcenkoAN OPEN LETTER TO THE LADY WHO ALWAYS REQUESTS TWO NAPKINS AT MY RESTAURANT Dear Miss or Mrs., First off, although my hostess shift covers only the lunch crowd on a Monday through Friday basis, I am well aware that every day when you leave us at 1:30pm—after you request two cloth napkins, and after you swallow three bites of Today’s Special—that you will be back in five hours for dinner. And sometimes, forty-five minutes later, when you remember the dessert you ordered while you sit in the parking lot and reapply your lipstick to your muttering lips in ...

CircusMAGIC TRICK He presses the deck of cards into her hands and says: Shuffle. As you shuffle, think about all the cards in the deck. Concentrate on a single card, but don’t choose one, just hand the deck back to me when you have the image clear in your mind. She does as he says. Her mind settles on the three of spades. She returns the deck to him. He takes it in one flat, outstretched palm and rests his other hand over the top card. He concentrates for a moment, eyes closed, then fans all the cards and, without ...

Andrea RothmanLITTLE FEATHERS The bird lay shivering on the lawn, their faces reflected dark and alien in his button eye. The other eye, the one on the left side of his head, was shut, or possibly gone. A clot of blood and barbs seemed to fill its place. The woman, called Anne, scooped him awkwardly into a kitchen towel and carried him across the juniper-bordered path to the house, her daughter Anne Marie skipping merrily behind her. Set against the hardwood kitchen floor, the bird perked up, flapped a wing and began hopping between mother and child. With only one ...

Madeline ZehnderTHE TASTE OF OTHERS She walks gingerly toward the man chopping onions, who turns but does not shake her hand. Later she will learn this was politeness; right now she thinks he is rude. He criticizes the oil she picks for her salad dressing, causing her to cry and consider quitting. In May, she saves his menu with an asparagus dish so fresh and vital they cannot help but kiss for hours behind the stock pots. In June, he finds her cleaning knives at the sink and confesses that his estranged wife has returned. She hurls a cleaver and ...

Michael HeadSMALL He stood staring out the peephole and waiting for the girl who said she’d come. She was three days late and he didn’t have a television so he mostly stood staring out the peephole and counting the seconds. It didn’t bother him that the power had been shut off for five days or that the rent was a full week overdue. He had twelve thousand dollars in a backpack and he was waiting for the girl who said she’d come. She would bring one thousand grams of Small and they might fuck and she would leave. He was ...

Melissa SarnoFALL ON ME I'm on a crowded subway, clutching a heavy book that requires two hands not one, but where to place my fingers? On the warm metal pole, or balance, maybe lean, against a door or a railing where the puff of a stranger's sleeve already peaks through. I'm lost in rolling sentences, in the rain of words, and I am close, too close, to the tangle of her hair and the backpack strap slapping at my wrists, with my messenger bag smashed between an angry stare and the dull hum of his headphones. When she comes on, I'm ...

Connor Towne O'NeillSTEADY MOVE ITS OWN STILLNESS Of the seven septuplets that live in their grandfather’s grandfather clock, only the seventh—the blind one—spends time on the pendulum. While the others spin the balance wheel, study iambs to the slip-and-catch of the escapement, regulate heart-rates to the second hand, the blind seventh pendulums alone. Her weight skews time, oblongs the steady swing. The grandfather who sets the grandfather clock, dead-reckons it against high-noon in Columbia, PA, notices the loss of seconds daily. Using his grandfather tools, he recalibrates to the new-weighted sway of his granddaughter’s blind penduluming. He speaks softly, silently, ...

Shaun TurnerKENTUCKY SNAKES Me and Dorsey worked with Gross Lumber down in the woods behind Viola Creek and we'd cut our share of trees. In the woods, not even Lloyd Gross cared how many beers we drank. All the loggers—usually men from McKee—would split a paper-bagged six-pack around noon and just relax. A bird-call would echo, and the foliage would brush against itself, and the insects would hum just behind the brush, and we would puncture our cans with a long metal churchkey in a way that felt smooth, natural. Two years ago, Dorsey was buzzed and he spotted this ...

Joshua IsardPLATITUDES The only platitude anyone should ever offer is I love you. It is the only phrase that they know is true, that you know is true. You'll be fine, you'll be great, everything will work out—those phrases aren't meant to make you feel better, only to forget the problem until you're at a safe distance from the speaker. The only person who told me the truth was my boss. My boss who puts an away message on his email every night when he leaves the office and once looked at my phone and asked what I do with ...

Devin KellyGROWING UP She is naked save for pink socks, and her pale young behind squeaks as she slides, or inches, down the balustrade. The sound echoes off the wooden floorboards and she imagines a tiny creature screaming in short bursts. She cannot determine if the screams are pained or joyful. All things contain a little of both, she thinks. Twirling, orbiting around the living room, she laughs as only a child can laugh at the midnight hour when her parents are asleep and the dark, turning world seems to house a different sort of life. Pale moonlight filtered in ...

Mercedes LawryTHE ACOLYTES, LIAR, AND BOX The Acolytes Somebody drowned the acolytes. They were not wee fellows so it must have been someone with plenty of muscle. Now an emptiness hovers like a bad smog burning throats and lungs. The professionals were involved at once but clearly, their training had been inadequate and they wrapped themselves in their worn bafflement, bowed their heads and retired to their tepid soup. The amateurs were all aflutter with the cleared field and began stacking hypotheses like wooden blocks, a bit too close to the haphazard and thus, doomed to topple. One lone wolf ...

Nick KolakowskiTHE GREAT WAVE CARRIES YOU FORWARD Marie’s husband Zachary passed away in early March, followed two weeks later by the dog. Marie would never confess this to anyone, but she missed the dog a little more than Zack. At least the mutt could stick to one bed. Marie would never confess this, either, but a deserted house can be pretty enjoyable. She took down Zack’s framed Bullitt poster from its prime spot in the living room and, with the help of an online art class, painted a giant wave crashing onto a skiff of Japanese fishermen. None of her ...

Royee Zvi AtadgyAN EVEN, PERFECT BURN Come here, he said. No, you can just watch me and then afterwards we’ll go to sleep and that’ll be the end of it, she said. You mean that we’ll go to sleep like it never happened. It never did, she said. In the glow of the single desklamp, yellow glow, onionskin, he watched her shed her black cardigan like a snake in the darkness, revealing first the shadowy bones of her shoulder blades—very thin and on the verge of falling out of her back like two ice shelves. Then it was the middle ...

Olive MulletIN SEARCH OF DEATH Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me. —Emily Dickinson —So why are you working at Hospice? Death is my thing. I’ve read all the books on it, most of them disappointing. Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of, for example. All he talks about is his fear of death, and he quotes philosophers on death. —You are not here just to give massages. No. I want to find out what it’s like to die. —So you ask the dying what they are feeling? Yep. (long pause) —And—what have you discovered? ...

Robert WexelblattMARCH 5, 1953 The funeral was flowerless. Every early spring bloom had been expropriated by the KGB for their boss. Scarcely forty people dared show up. Charged with counter-revolutionary bourgeois tendencies, tormented and shunned by the Composers Union, his wife and sons held hostage in Siberia, he composed wretched anthems to power plants and worse, Zdravitsa. It was a case of write our der’mo or die. Nevertheless, masterworks of “anti-democratic formalism” continued to pour forth. His meager stipend was cut; he very nearly starved. Given another decade and he might have sluiced out all that filth with a flood ...

Justin NicholesA SAD, LOGICAL CAPITULATION (after D. H. Lawrence) The day a welding rod shimmied down Zou’s collar and combusted his shirt into singed tendrils, the same day my stomach caught traction in the scoop of his lower back and I knew I was in love, also the same day the building gave way, all of us died. It’s how these things happen, I guess. During our lives our bodies ricochet along until all we stumble into, all that’s rolled our ways, amasses into these blurred mirrors (I’m getting at corporeality here; I’m getting at ghosts). The building’s integrity flagged, ...

Thompson MayesPIGEON He was hot, too hot, walking on the sunny side of the hard stone streets through tourist stickiness of dripped gelato. He felt as wilted as the reddish-pink blooms that drooped out of the doorway, and he could smell the roach poison they must use here, wafting up from small dark gaps at the base of the buildings. He avoided the pigeons, suspected they were diseased, though he could hear their burbling as they waddled on the dirty streets. It had been churches today, and each of the dim, frescoed interiors had been a calm relief from the ...

Ray ScanlonARACHNICIDE An organ pipe mud dauber is building a nest in the ornamental tin-roofed wren house Cheryl hung by the door. I hear her stridulating at her masonry work, and see her carry a small ball of mud into the bird house, a first for me, even though I've casually watched her predecessors for years. Our paths are bound, by simple proximity, to intersect before long. One day she emerges just as I step outside, rockets up, appraises me, hovers motionless at point-blank range. I freeze. She stares me in the eye. I gain a more mature understanding of ...

Laurie BlaunerASSEMBLING AN ANATOMICAL LIFE To Annie I labeled all the dancers’ body parts and told them how to use them.  I prepared resonant music, a prescription for feet that kaleidoscoped from room to room.  I described what I wanted, a mouth yanked upward, ankles and hands telling a phantom story, heads grouped into archipelagoes.  I was the one going nowhere.  I theorized, discussed, directed their bodies, which leaned against one another’s shoulders. “Arm?” one asked. “If you want one.” There was a movement of undressing and tiptoeing toward the unlocked door. They floated and spun, lifting themselves.  The floor ...

Ivy HughesLAVERNE AND SHIRLEY I held the handset of the house phone to my ear, the dull tone providing a soundtrack for what was sure to be the most humiliating conversation of my life. From the sitting room, the three-foot oil painting of Shirley and Laverne hovered like consequence itself. Posed with pink and blue ring pillows in their mouths on the day of their wedding, the great white poodle and hyperactive Yorkie were the only children my ex-boyfriend’s mother and stepfather shared. My ex and his family were spending Christmas in California, an event I hadn’t been invited to ...

Kristen SharpTELESCOPES In a dress with sequins the color of champagne, her legs like bone, she crouched on the beach and dug her hand under the packed wet sand. The New Year had been mostly Manhattans and whiskey-gingers and drunk finance hotshots from Murray Hill and Stuy-Town trying to buy girls out. The salt-cold wind blew grit down the face of the dunes. She drew her knees to her chest and drank vodka. People were getting engaged. But still she clung to her brick building in Morningside, to the holes in the walls where the electrical wiring had been gutted, ...

Lori LamotheLEXICON I’ve forgotten the language of cities, of travel. I insert the room key upside down, stumble over a couch in the lobby, ride the wrong subway line, walk South instead of North. New York hems me in, surrounds me on all sides until I’m drowning in cigarette smoke, screaming horns, the kind of humidity that settles on skin and won’t wash off. The horizon is harder than the soft green sweep of home—stone and steel, mirrored windows that catch the sky and won’t let go. I’ve forgotten how to speak the language of strangeness. Years ago I drove ...

DC LambertWHEN SANTA CAME TO CHERRY HILL, NEW JERSEY You could hear the sirens blocks away, and if you didn’t know, you’d think it was a real emergency. Santa Claus had trouble keeping balance, so the fire truck took it very slowly as it crept around Cherry Hill’s subdivisions and rows of fifty-year-old colonials in need of new roofs, furnaces, windows; they could not be replaced, just now, in this economy. Perched on the truck, Santa waved and weaved past illuminated inflatable reindeer and whirling pink snowflakes projected onto garages, and families ran outside to catch a glimpse, shivering a ...

Catherine Mosier-MillsCHRISTMAS 2009 The family was crowded around the small white gazebo in the middle of the yard. There was a map, too, pasted on the corkboard floating high on the gazebo’s walls, confining the chaotic compound in abstract squares and rectangles. Ruth didn’t touch the peanut brittle, the haphazard compensation present from her middle child, the feminist from Philadelphia, who’d brought her two kids. The conversation was a facsimile of previous email exchanges that she’d intercepted from her late husband’s computer, carrying the buzzwords of a telltale worrywart: college search, apnea, bullying. Whenever Ruth tried to make her way ...

Lisa PiazzaLOOK, HERE For this, I use my grandfather’s axe. Pull it carefully from behind the dead cat’s carrier in the garage, where it rests dusty and dull, subdued by seasons more or less come and gone. More because fifteen winters is a long time for a dormant blade—idle through fifteen springs and summers followed by fifteen hopeful falls glimmering with red-gold readiness. Less because it is only my bony fingers that inexpertly grip the heavy wooden handle ready to hack the camellias crowding the far corner of my backyard. Mine is a small job. I have hated these trees ...

Sean LyonHOW A HEART Tricia the three-toed sloth started to slipper my hand into her undergrowth. “Wow,” I clickered, “I’m in love with this rainforest.” Then she maffled her tongue down some other toucan’s throat. How a heart emflampers under such circumstances! “O,” I lunkered, “The bananarama is cancelled, it’s over.” I clambered up the stairs, my beak petricuckolded, clorping like a gaunt gibbous moon against each step on my sweltering accent to smither canopy. Just then an ocelot corrustickered my eye, slimmering over her tree-house-porch card table and trucing me hence with her manicured claws. I wallifer-fluttered, with all ...

YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa If God looked for Yvonne would he find her? If God looked down, past stars and satellites, through storm clouds thick and grey as dryer lint, would he see Yvonne in a stolen van, Yvonne in a darkened shopping plaza with Ma’s Diner and A-1 Hardware, Crafts Basket and Pets Plus? Yvonne is down on options, down on her luck. Listening to the sighs and snores of her dog asleep in the back seat, the beat of rain on the roof. Her world the smell of wet dog. Her face in ...

Donna VorreyerPHENOMENON Homes awash in moonlight, in streetlight, the whole neighborhood hunched and hiding, watching the sky. All of the children are adrift, huddled in bushes, running under branches well past their usual bedtimes. It is a strange phenomenon, but one that goes unquestioned. In the morning, the grown-ups confess that they thought they saw a UFO, a strange streak that grew then slipped away too quickly for logic. For the next night, for the rest of the weekend, a vigil, lawn chairs clustered, poised to catch a second glimpse. The pleasures of these evenings were many—playing late in the ...

Kevin ToscaROMEO & JULIETTE Romeo sent this text to Juliette: “Goodnight Julie.” She didn’t respond. It was their first night not sleeping together in two years. He didn’t know what she was thinking. The next morning, he had to return to the suburb where they lived to get the rest of his stuff. They agreed he would call before he left, and he did so beside the stairs leading down to the subway. The call went to Juliette’s voice mail. Romeo took two trains. When he got outside at the appallingly familiar bus depot, he tried to call again, and ...

Carlo MatosHONEY You could tell they weren’t from around here by the way they spread their honey, with a finger instead of a spoon—all thin, pilling at the rug of bread. It was like the day she finally admitted she had Hitler mannerisms: those arms, the contortions, the albedo—even the way the sweat flew off her cheeks—the fact that she always seemed to be yelling: her spit, an electron planning its next escape. Already there were so many things she couldn’t do—just to be on the safe side. She would never grow a mustache, for example, but, of course, now ...

Lindsay MillerA NICE PLACE TO VISIT My sister told me she was so hungry the night before that she had licked the inside of an empty sugar packet. “I found it in the couch cushion and tore it open and ran my tongue along the inside of it,” she said. “Pathetic.” She said this over the phone from Los Angeles, or from a place close enough to Los Angeles that she could get away with calling it Los Angeles. She had arrived two months before with the intention of getting a job in a tanning salon or coffee shop for ...

Lily BrentTHE BIOLOGICAL NEED TO ADAPT If I miss one thing it’s the butterfly mobile I bought in Mexico, now hanging on a nail and gathering dust. One of the painted cardboard butterflies has already been crushed and smoothed out and you can still see the seams. I don’t remember exactly where I bought it, only that it was at the green side of a gravel road. I want to say it was at the bottom of that pyramid of stairs, but maybe I’m only trying to glorify the place in my mind. If I’ll miss one thing it’s the ...

Desiree WilkinsLEAP YEAR BABY 1976:   I spend my days on the couch with grandma while mom’s at work at the diner. Grandma eats chocolate bon-bons and watches soap operas. We play outside and she smokes a cigarette while I commence my plan to rid the world of bees. It’s quite simple: all I have to do is uproot every flower in the ground and the bees will not survive. There are many flowers and I have been unsuccessful in recruiting other revolutionaries. 1980:   Mom is gone to California, leaving me with Grandma. She sends a postcard with no return address ...

Mercedes LawryTWO FLASH PIECES Puzzling The baby ate one of the puzzle pieces, a little bitty piece. He never choked or even coughed. The piece was cardboard and mostly blue sky with just a smidgen of white cloud. Its shape was similar to a chalice and did not vaguely resemble food. It certainly looked tasty to the baby, although in the baby’s mind, interest in the puzzle piece was not limited to a gustatory experience or oral fixation. Just as easily, tasty might refer to something requiring further exploration. The baby might have been trying to understand the puzzle piece ...

George DilaTHAT SUMMER That was the summer his partner of 54 years died, brain-stroked down to the old kitchen linoleum while he, sweating under a brutal July sun, weeded their half-acre garden. They had had their lunch, remnants of last night's dinner, a slice of meatloaf, an ear of corn, washed down with a cold Rolling Rock. She said she would clean up. He said he needed to finish outside, just a row of tomatoes and Hungarian peppers to go, yanking out by hand the deep-rooted intruders chemicals could have killed so easily. Then, he would hose the dirt from ...

Daniel TordayAIR CONDITIONER I recently had a difficult argument with my Aunt Lucille about turning up an air conditioner. My wife and I were staying with my aunt in Baltimore for a weekend where, after all, air conditioning was necessary in the summer. Lucille asked if I wanted her to turn up my air conditioner before bed. I said no, I didn’t like it too cold. So? she said. So, I said, I didn’t want it turned up. She stated rather forcefully that turning up an air conditioner meant making the room warmer, not cooler. “Turn up the air conditioner,” ...

Amber Lee DoddCROCODILE HANDS Like blind men feeling for pictures Anna and Chloe had felt for differences in their matching faces. Eyes closed Anna could feel the little kink in the bridge of Chloe’s nose, a dimple when she smiled that she could not duplicate and lips that curved higher into a pert cupids bow. Eyes open they were identical but eyes shut they knew every variation. As children they had played their game of reflection as if an act of praise. Hours spent mirroring each other under the plastic garden table. Capturing each other’s grins, grimaces before turning to ...

Kate LaDewTHE SONG IN A CLOUD Willard was always humming to himself. Whenever Tom saw him, he was humming and looking up and smiling and sometimes not smiling, sometimes looking even sad, but always humming. Tom thought Willard might be what his mother called simple and so was always very gentle when he saw him but never got very close, just in case. One day, the day after Tom had his heart broken by Elsbeth White, a girl he had known more than half his life, he saw Willard lying on the ground in the little space of grass behind ...

Carly GreenbergWASH, RINSE, REPEAT There are so many cycles to choose from. Bulky, delicate, perm press. The dial shifts from one setting to the other. Darks, whites, colors. It turns clock-wise and back. Hot, warm, cold. A tablet is loaded, a button pressed, the lid lowers with a click. Time seems to drag on with just a few grumbling quips, this metal box mocking you for your peculiar fixation. A few moments more until you hear it- the rush of a miniature tidal wave. The metal cube begins to shift and scrape and tear at the Spanish tile beneath its ...

John CarrollJOURNALISM No one in my family talks about Uncle Terry, or why there never was a funeral. We did have a wake. We gathered at his house. The priests came in turtlenecks and polo shirts. My mother hovered by the basement door, ushering me away when I pleaded for just a minute at the pool table. My cousins suffered a similar fate. We soon gossiped to one another, only to find we’d been told the same story: Uncle Terry was working in the basement and accidentally stuck his finger into an electrical socket, a Saturday morning cartoon turned fatality ...

Mark MondalekTHE STRAIGHT WARP OF NECESSITY Seated on the examiners table, I hold a mouse pad-sized monitor in place over my left breast with assorted electrodes leeched upon my arms and chest and my pacemaker’s memory bank is successfully tapped dry. All my secrets electronically spill onto a sleek computer screen for only my cardiologist to read and the zigzagged data codes become lost in translation to me. I’m soon told of what my nurse described as a tiny short circuit in my electrical system; an intermittent junctional rhythm, to be exact. “Something new,” my doctor keeps repeating rather intriguingly ...

I stayed up 'til 1:00 AM a few weeks ago, and where was the party? At my desk, with everything but the keyboard covered in postage stamps. Polish stamps, Poczta Polska, all issued between 1928 and 1969. Musty old stamps honoring tanks and trade union congresses, marking six-year plans and newspaper tricentennials and the 1000-year anniversary of the country itself. Clumps of stamps memorializing uprisings in Silesia, the recovery of territories, and planes, lots of planes, carrying mail or flying over cities. New steelworks, new electric plants, well-muscled and barefoot coal miners, studious children, Curie and Kopernik and korfball, Chopin and ...

Angel HoganTINY MAGICS Sometimes it is an outrage. When Mila considers the chances and possibilities in this world, the fine lines and gaping canyons between what is good or not, the distances between blessed and cursed, she is outraged enough to spit! "I have had a hard life, no doubt," she mutters inwardly on her way to catch water from the well. "I've had a life that makes others wonder how I have managed, still, to have an open heart and love. I am flawed and far from perfect but I BELIEVE!" Mila believed in goodness and love and light, even after ...

Charles RaffertyA SIGHTING My friend was on the subway in New York when he noticed a man get on, walk down the aisle, and take his place two rows forward of where he sat. This new passenger was our old friend. Neither of us had seen him in twenty years, and now there was a sighting — a proof that he existed, that he had climbed out from under whatever the world had heaped upon him. But my friend, the one who was on the train first, said nothing to this other friend. He couldn't really explain it when I ...

Ann de ForestCLOSING THE CURTAINS 1. Daughter A little girl sits alone in her room at night, reading. The lights are on. The curtains are open. She feels safe inside her room, inside her book. She knows what lies outside in the dark. She doesn't even have to look. Just below her window, a hedgerow of purple-berried bushes. If she eats the berries, she will get sick and probably die, says her mother. The bluejays eat them though. Sometimes the little girl watches them, so greedy they drop most of their harvest on the ground. The sidewalk is stained with splatters of red juice. Beyond the bushes and the sidewalk is the street. Across the street, a street lamp glows ...

Michelle FostWHY NOT THROW KISSES? My parents thought it hilarious when I sent them giddy kisses from behind the glass at JFK. I saw them standing there, gesturing with their hands lifting off their mouths into the air in my direction. I mistakenly thought they were sending me farewell and bon voyage kisses, and I sailed my kisses back to them. My parents saw it as slapstick. They kissed and laughed and waved their arms.  They would tell me later how they were trying to remind me to pick up the carton of cigarettes we’d purchased together at duty free for our ...

Jim EigoUNDERGROUND & DEATH PANEL Underground (Union Square) On the crowded subway platform a space had cleared around the couple. For reasons no passerby could ascertain, the expensively-dressed young man and woman—Wall Street by the cut of the suits, the fabric, the accessories—were slapping each other. Fewer of us were passing by anymore: we had stopped to watch. Clearly the guy was holding something back, like this was all a kind of game—though his clenched jaw told the captive crowd he was having no fun, taking more care to parry his partner’s blows than to land his own. By contrast ...

Kevin Tosca“THE 104″; “TIBET”; “LIKE THAT” The 104 Two men were standing in the belly of the bus. The one with a cane—old, but not too old—approached the younger. “Should I take you there?” said the older man. The younger, middle-aged man had a couple of bags at his feet: groceries. He looked at them, and then he looked up, unsurprised by the older man’s question. “Where’s there?” he asked. “Your house,” said the older man. The younger man paused again. He was neither flustered nor annoyed. “But I know the way to my house,” he said. “Is that all ...

LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa The streets smell like fried dough and there’s the carnival sound of an outdoor mic, a tinny crackle that makes him think of Little League games and awards day at summer camp. It sounds like the end of summer. The locals are celebrating something, the patron saint of clam cakes. They’re selling raffle tickets, but he’s not buying chances. The sky is dark blue, but he’s not watching the sky. The café door is open, inviting him to a darker world of scratched wooden floors and mismatched tables and hard metal chairs: the world of Latte ...

Max McKennaGARY'S SISTER The same way we didn’t know, way back when, that mom and dad couldn’t stand their “friends, ” so we didn’t know that Gary’s sister wasn’t interested in either of us, which starts to explain why she kept mixing up our names last Saturday night in the busted stretch limo that cut through the grey-blue soup of Pacific Avenue, with the winding path of a rocket about to be decommissioned, after she pulled us into the back of it where she was already singing along with the radio and pounding the ceiling that snowed bits of dried-out ...

Rachel R. TaubeWORM DIRT She found me digging up worms in my backyard. Just plopped down beside me and started wriggling herself when I found one in the freshly turned soil. Later, her mother was angry about the worm dirt on her dress, but she came back the next day. “My name is Mara,” she said this time. What a pretty name on her lips, she smiled just a little on the “ar” and I saw her dimples. Her lips were pink like a worm. “This one’s name is Cara-Beth,” she said, pointing. She named each worm we found: Mariel, ...

David SchumanSUBJECT You’re scrubbing grout in the bathroom when the old guy next door shouts through the wall. Wants to know if you’ll come over and see his paintings. He’s been bugging you ever since you moved in, convinced you’ll understand what he’s getting at. It’s ten minutes before Maritza may or may not arrive. The tub looks clean, even around the drain. The old guy opens his door and you’re hit with a whoosh of stewy air. He’s got about twenty canvasses, some hung, some leaning against the walls, all of his little dog. Pepé. My muse, he says ...

Rebecca EntelONYX Raised voices hush a room, lower eyes.  But the sound of skin hitting skin.  But a slap. The sound, an air-thickening sponge, slogged from one room to the next.  It stilled the action in each.  Heads looked away from the TV;  hands paused lining the table with silverware;  mouths at the door stopped saying hello. After a few minutes, our hostess came back downstairs.  Her eyes were the slightest bit red.  But she smiled. “Time for dinner, everyone.”  We followed her into the dining room. Our host came in quietly while we were shuffling about, finding seats.  He ...

Michelle E. CrouchTHE CURATED HOME When maintaining the curated home, one must behave much as if were one were employed at a museum. The collections management database, however, will not exist on a computer or even on yellowed paper files. You will have to create the catalog in your head. It may help to invent a mental taxonomy. For instance:  “memorabilia, rare” – which consist of anything from a guitar signed by Rod Stewart to vintage Russian film posters. This would be a distinct category from “collectibles,” consisting of say, a matching set of Le Crueset cookware. Or the cookware ...

Martha CooneyCORMAC I was kicking my football along the road in our estate, timing my kicks to each time the curbstones changed color. They were painted in the Ireland flag’s green, white, and gold, just to let anybody foolish enough to get lost in North Belfast know they were in a Catholic estate. I turned into the alley and kicked the ball ahead, prepared to chase after it past imaginary defenders, but stopped short. Standing in front of the rubbish bin halfway down the alley was Cormac Devaney, from my year at school. He was holding a teddy bear, not ...

Elizabeth MosierEVERYTHING MUST GO “Here’s what you do,” a friend said to my husband, eyeing the dreck on our front porch, residuals from a previous sale: the single chair, incomplete set of plates, fancy dolls our daughters never played with, battered sleigh they had outgrown. “You go to the bank. You get $200.00 cash. You pay someone a hundred bucks to haul this shit away. You give your wife the other $100.00 and tell her it was a huge success. Nobody wants stuff you don’t want.” How I wish my husband had done it, though I’d insisted on the sale ...

Thaddeus RutkowskiENCOUNTER WITH THE DEVIL You dirty rat,” I said. I was talking to the devil himself. I spoke without trepidation, even though I was addressing a creature with horns and a pointed tail. “You don’t have a monopoly on evil or sin,” I said. The earrings he wore started jingling. “I wish it would snow sometimes, here in hell,” he said. “Not in this circle,” I said, “or in any circle of your infernal underworld.” “I made my fortress strong,” he replied, “to keep out twerps like you.” I could feel my neck starting to burn under my collar ...

Nahid RachlinZAHRA When Shamsi and her two small children moved into some rooms in my aunt’s house, they looked very poor. My aunt, the owner of the house, took pity on them and reduced the rent by 30 toomans a month. Wherever Shamsi went her children followed her. One of her daughters, Zahra, the smaller of the two, was blind in one eye and her other eye could only see vague shadows of things. In the mornings her eyelashes were covered with pus and the whites of her eyes were lined with red veins. No one knew how Shamsi suddenly ...

Michael Neal MorrisWAKING The straps at the top of the mask cut a little into his forehead. The top of his skull seemed to be burning, and for a silly moment he wondered if he had any hair left. Of course he did. The taste of the air blowing on him said something was on fire. He fell asleep then, and dreamed his dead father had come over to help him work on the car. When he woke, his wife, shaking his arm, was talking to him. He unclasped his CPAP mask, and tried to look at her though his ...

Beth KephartSCRABBLE I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it:  nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. It wasn’t hard. But you were asleep by then, west to my east, uncorrupted by the plain and the soft of my imagination, the occasional and wire ...

Lynn LevinTHE ASK SANDWICH The TSA lady at Newark Airport had a nice touch, and Josie enjoyed the pat down. The blue gloves slid under her arms, along her sides, down one leg, then the other. They searched, discerned. They pleased with just the right amount of pressure. Josie thanked the TSA lady, who nodded back with very professional brown eyes. In bed last night in Robert’s apartment, it was their sixth time together, Josie had attempted the “ask sandwich,” something she’d read about in a woman’s magazine. First she told him how nice his cologne smelled and trailed her ...

Rachel PastanBONES Once, they’d read aloud to each other all the time: letters, menus, fliers posted on telephone poles along the streets. Missing dog, black, one white ear, answers to Shayna. For sale, stereo cabinet, some damage. Telugu lessons, $10/hour. Telugu, they’d said, maybe we should learn Telugu? Now, the sun streams in through the windows onto the stained tablecloth, onto the chipped cups and the tarnished spoons and the damp sugar in the saucer they use for sugar, and they no longer speak to each other even in English. She doesn’t even read him the headlines.  ñShe won’t—can’t—read him ...

Kathryn J Allwine BacasmotHUMMING Listening to Glenn Gould’s albums of Bach’s keyboard music, you will hear a noise in the background: the sound of someone humming. As a child I gravitated toward the Gould recording on the shelf that held my parents’ collection of LPs, everything ranging from the Bee Gees to Schumann, covers worn on the edges. Carefully placing it on the turntable, I dropped the needle on the vinyl, and then dropped myself to the floor where I would press my ear into the soft brown cover of the large speakers that were half my height, hold my ...