“Your mother’s batshit crazy,” said Sister Loretta
“Madam’s not from the Valley, poor dear,” explained Sister Carmel. “That’s the problem. Your mother’s not grounded like we are. My family has lived here forever.”
Sister Carmel selected a cupcake from my tray. She pointed the cupcake at an ancient and rudimentary clock, one of a dozen in the room where the sisters were awaiting their assignations with that evening’s clients.
Continue reading “Stopped Watch by Scott Pomfret”
It was her father who first showed her. If you pointed your arms straight at two very distant points, features in the landscape, or clouds, or stars, you made yourself the centre of the universe. Everything was drawn into you, you were the fundamental point of a triangle, whose hypotenuse, a funny word at first but easy to remember once you had said it two or three times, could shift between any pair of objects, the sun and the moon, two trees, the chimney on top of the neighbours’ roof and the tv aerial on the top of her parents’ house, any two things, anywhere. It really didn’t matter, it was still a triangle, because of the one fixed point, and the two others.
Continue reading “A Call To Arms by Julian Walker”
When I was six or seven and attending a segregated Black school in Virginia, I had a crush on the smartest girl in our class. Gloria was not only smart but cute and friendly to everyone.
Continue reading “I Can See Clearly Now by Frederick K Foote”
I had been bleeding one year. Was told that made me a woman, but didn’t feel like one. Felt still small, my baby hair still soft. Light wisps on ice cream skin. Like the fluff of a wolf pup before it turns wiry in the winter, shedding its youth as its softness falls away. Maybe that was my bleeding. Maybe my softness was leaving me, replaced by black-red oozing and inside bruising.
Continue reading “Fifteenth Year by Jessica Cull”
I drove a 1963 Flamengo-orange Thunderbird, wore navy blue tennis shoes, and sat eating a banana split at the A&W. It was 1986. In White Haven, Tennessee, where truck drivers were thought to be rich, it was still considered a big deal to go to the movies. Girls looked forward to losing their virginity in the back row at the Malco Theatre.
Continue reading “Shake or Float? By David Lohrey”
Abbess Wang was the first to discover the baby at the doorstep of the temple, bundled up in thick layers of blankets, protecting it from the chilly night. She checked its sex. Instantly, she developed a deep dislike for the boy. This was the first time someone had left an infant at the temple, and Abbess Wang did not want it to acquire a reputation for being an orphanage.
Continue reading “Temple Dog by Richard Yu”
Rio sits in an orange and yellow faded tent in the middle of an overgrown field. The sun is low in the sky and slants through the branches of trees that died long ago, grey and brittle instead of green and supple. There are buildings not too far from him—houses—but Rio doesn’t go to the houses. His parents told him not to go there.
Continue reading “Rio by Kailyn Kausen”
It wasn’t a lifetime but 37 years was a good stretch of time.
After a particularly vivid dream where the two spoke again finally, and connected intimately in the lobby of the apartment building he grew up in, Craig Bugowski woke up happy, and fished for his iPhone.
Karrie M. was on his list of Facebook friends.
She had accepted his FB invite two years prior.
Her birthday was a month ago. She was a Gemini.
It was the summer that cost us more than we knew. When we atoned for our sins and kept on sinning. When a small part of us died and we fumbled to fill the growing void. When we forgot, in truth, how to ask. The summer Ben slept with Lola, who was loved by Jeremy who slept with Kat who fucked, despite her beauty, like a corpse. And later, when a rash smothered his groin like English Ivy, Jeremy scuttled around the kitchen, poking his member like a cactus.
Ten-year-old Josh walked to school on an already hot May morning. The bulldozers roared and pushed along the river, clearing the bush and the cottonwood trees for new condo development. Josh’s skinny white pony-tailed neighbour, landlord Glaser Neil called out from his yard “hey, take a look at this,” and Josh stopped. Neil often acquired odd things. Odd but interesting. Neil pointed behind his lilac bush. Josh looked over and smelled the lilacs. Glaser motioned for Josh to come in, and the boy opened the gate and peered at the back of a cage. “What’s in there?” he asked. He heard a growl.
Continue reading “Child at the Edge of the Wilderness by Harrison Kim”
