There is something about the feel of a coin. It’s that cool heavy feeling. I had a year’s worth of Alcoholics Anonymous coins in my pocket, and I jingled them as I walked down this country road.
The concrete road was cracked and unmarked, and the sky was darkening. A few hundred meters ahead stood what looked like an old-timey photo booth.
Continue reading “Insert Coin by Ari Derin”
AUGUST 2021:
“My will is your authority,” says Vern, the bishop’s mitre wearing business dealer. His blue veined cheeks turn red, then purple, as he laughs until the tears flow, rocking back and forth, holding his sides in front of red-bearded, yellow-toothed twenty-seven-year-old Alex as they sit making connections and trades in the rusted bus that is Vern’s hoarder home. “Hold the mirror higher,” Vern commands, and Alex does. He sees the red capillaries bulge under Vern’s eyes. “Where did you get this holy hat?” the dealer asks.
Continue reading “Between Vern and Alex by Harrison Kim”
I can’t help the past. Even if it would have been good, and sometimes it was… It’s gone. I met Angie where all transitory beings are met. I met her in a bar.
A cool basement bar, the “Das Keller,” scattered with peanut shells on smooth cement. Where a young demonic Hitler might thrive, but there were no demons on that bright, wasting-away afternoon. Unless you counted the ones inside me.
Continue reading “Old Haunts by Christopher Ananias”
I stopped drinking after my younger brother Cody chose assisted death. He was paralyzed from the neck down and never able to get high again because of it. That gave him courage.
Continue reading “When I Almost Became a Monk by Harrison Kim”
The last time Dave showed up clean, he brought bagels and a joke.
“I had to use the car key to spread the cream cheese,” he said, holding it up like evidence. “Don’t worry. I wiped it on my pants first.”
It was early—gray morning light, barely six—and we sat on the hood of his rusting Civic in the driveway, steam rising from coffee in mismatched mugs. He wore a collared shirt that still had fold creases in it. His hair was damp. He looked awake in a way I hadn’t seen in years.
Continue reading “The Summer He Let Me Be General by Jacob Alexander Cohen”
Night falls black and starless. His eye is drawn to the cemetery. A chill runs through him. Young sees his breath in the porch light. He takes the air into account—the change. Things will have to be shut off soon and covered, other things will have to be turned on. He hears footsteps and the slamming of cabinet doors. Young thinks, are those snowflakes? I hope not. Trinity’s rusty black Chevy Cavalier has the trunk lid standing open.
Continue reading “Girl on a Trampoline by Christopher Ananias”
The congregation came to him in the merest tendrils of the dawn’s earliest and sickest light, the sky’s face the same faded blue of an overdose.
They came to him like faces in a fever dream, seeking answers as they always did. The preacher didn’t have them. He was looking for answers of his own. He was dope-sick after all, the slow crawl of heroin fidgeting in his collapsing veins as it made its retreat, making the marrow of his bones ache. His body was already begging for more liquid forgiveness, and there was the other issue that he needed to attend to, the issue that made his need all the more desperate, the issue that had marooned the preacher in the sleepless raft of his stiff bed with nothing but his anxious thoughts to sustain him.
Continue reading “Spite by Alex Sinclair”
Marku 3 was a planet with a sun in eternal eclipse.
I landed there just over a week ago, careful to make camp within a small clearing in a forest full of pale, leafless trees. It was midday. It was brisk. There was a calming eeriness about the way the dim orange sunlight painted everything in shadows.
On that first night a group of the planet’s natives came to the camps’ perimeter and watched me in wonder. They were primitive with skinny inverted legs, bulbous heads covered in wire-like hairs, and a single eye embedded within the center.
They communicated amongst themselves with clicking noises made by tapping two bone plates on the inside of their knees together.
One came as an emissary, approaching within feet of me. As it stepped within the harsh glow of a floodlight behind me it suddenly froze.
It’s single eye dilated. Every hair was out like spikes.
It started with a low rumble in its chest. A soft frequency vibrated inside me, growing stronger by the second.
It was warm.
It was mesmerizing.
A dopamine rush flooded my system. Nothing else existed but ecstasy.
Continue reading “Step 13 by Joe Jablonski”
Tin men play their kazoos too loud. Like having an annoying ass bee trying to drill into the deep part of your ear. It’s Sunday and it’s the boardwalk. Sea spray that you’re not supposed to touch or it’ll leave a nasty pollution rash. Gregg doesn’t care, though. His arm is messed up anyhow from all the lousy skateboarding.
Gregg rides and I walk and the waves shove against the wooden thing beneath our feet. Some people call it an embankment, but that sounds too much like a place where loose-tie fathers coax children into cashing checks in exchange for thin lollipops. Gregg grazes his lousy arm against the slippery arm rail, catches some sea spray in his mouth.
Continue reading “Arm Milk by Spencer Levy”
She’s like a storm cloud drifting my way. The thick, grey coat and bright yellow rain boots are probably a choice she made herself, because the sun’s out and I’m sweating like a pig. I don’t understand why Lenny would let her go out like that, but I don’t have kids and won’t pretend to understand what it’s like. I guess my only comparison to dressing a child is when Roger, my Rottweiler, comes running to me with his lead between his teeth because he wants to go to the park, and he’s got only that one lead. I guess I shouldn’t call a dog my kid, but all he wants is to eat, play, sleep, and shit. Roger’s the closest thing I’ll ever have to a kid—which I’m perfectly fine with.
Continue reading “Liza, Like Lizard by Joy Florentine”
