Returning from the bathroom for the second time that night, her eyes heavy with sleep, Helen squinted down the dark hallway at the faint white glow coming from the kitchen.
Did I forget to turn off the light? she wondered.
Continue reading “Helen’s Kitchen, 3:30 a.m. by Brian Clark”
They found me floating face down in the motel swimming pool, a seedy place off the Sunset Strip where we’d been partying. A janitor heard the splash. He dragged me up to the patio and slapped my cheeks, which was funny. I was already blue, and now some random guy was hitting me. We kissed. His breath choked me. I woke, briefly. Curled over, shivering on the lip of the deep end, my reflection rippling beneath as my lungs spasmed dry.
Continue reading “Emergence Delirium by Danielle Altman”
When Garf opened his refrigerator, he saw a jar of purple pickles beside the carton of expired milk. This was strange as, only yesterday, they were green. Garf stood in his itchy annoyance before the refrigerator, his red, black-striped robe hanging off his slumped body like an old, worn-out curtain.
Continue reading “Garf and the Purple Pickles by Landon Galliott”
They say that telepathy is a gift.
But it was not a gift when I was designed as a tool—a gene-twisted thing, a tool made of meat. My gaunt, pale, body was designed by the norms for one purpose—reading the thoughts of other norms. I was made to be a psychic burglar, built to uncover the secrets that a norm hides in the lies or silences of their porous mind.
Continue reading “The Mirrors of His Eyes, the Thirst of His Soul by David Newkirk”
On Wednesdays, I take my trash down to the curb. You have to wait until 3 pm to bring it down. It gets picked up on Thursday mornings at around 8 am. Our setup is a lot like other New England towns. There’s a blue bin for recyclables, a black bin for regular trash and a brown bin for yard waste.
Continue reading “What We Discard by Gil Hoy”
I was recently involved in the death of a man right here inside the Free Library.
He began making bird sounds near me. The cawing and trilling made it impossible to concentrate on my writing. When I moved, he followed. The bird songs grew louder and more long-winded.
My father, a Marine, told me that bird noises reminded him of a battle he fought inside a dark nameless jungle. Birds, he learned the hard way, unintentionally telegraph your location to the enemy. I am now older than my father was when he died inside our garage.
Continue reading “Time Capsule by Leland Neville”
I saw a little man riding a child’s bicycle in Berwyn, Illinois, outside Chicago, on the sidewalk, along Roosevelt Road. He was carrying a guitar; this was the first thing that caught my attention. The guitar was strapped over his back. But it was also slung down partly across the side of his body so he could cuddle it with one arm while he steered the bike with the other and pedaled the small pedals with his small legs.
Continue reading “The Old Guitarist by Dale W Barrigar”
Poisson Regression by JJ de Melo
Sweat sticks me to the couch. Like a bug in fly tape. The windows are open, but I only have one fan. It barely helps. I’m breathing hot soup in my apartment and I want out. To leave. Take a walk. But it’s not safe. Not yet.
Continue reading “Poisson regression by JJ de Melo”
Patsy flipped his eggs in the small frying pan, sizzling on the coils of his portable electric burner. Thin bacon smoke hung in his room. Can’t let that old bat of a landlady catch me cooking. He walked five steps to the room’s sole window, pounded the frame to break the ice seal, and opened it. Rochester’s mid-winter night air hit him like an arctic blast.
Continue reading “Patsy’s Last Gig by JD Clapp”
Sarah parked in the small lot beside Lava’s Bar on Lower Main not knowing what to expect. The ancient and industrial part of Wailuku looked the same as it had when she was a kid: non-descript dingy buildings, narrow alleys with the odd apartment sprinkled in, a snuffling dog on the corner. Despite the post-sunset, orangey sky, the area emanated an enticing melancholy, a feeling she remembered from the seat of her dad’s tow truck back in the early seventies en route to the junkyard, stereo shop, or TV repair. But now, there’s a bar! Maybe there was always a bar—or bars—here, but bars weren’t on her radar in those days, obviously. She’d always been curious about the dusty, mid-island pit of industrial Wailuku, compared to the tourist-dotted beaches in Kihei, where she had grown up a mere ten or so miles away.
Continue reading “Lava’s Bar by Marisa Mangani”
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