The day I find the box, Sam jumps the fence and I go looking for him. Dad calls Sam“A Repeat Offender,” but here we are, six months since Sam’s last escape and Dad still hasn’t fixed the fence.
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Tag: relationships
Otter by Tim Hildebrandt
My cubical is in a row along the east wall of the building. Windows provide ample light on a sunny day, filtered through a bank of trees ringing the parking lot outside. The wind in the trees create moving shadows on my desk, and I follow them as my mind wanders. I gaze at the ceiling ignoring my work. Reading is time-consuming, time I need for maintaining appearances and impressing others with skills and abilities always needing attention. Skills and abilities are my life’s work. I know what people look like when they have such skills, I know how they act. I try to act the same way so people will assume I have the same abilities. My goal is to learn how to engage effortlessly in small talk and put others at ease with humorous anecdotes. I search for anecdotes whenever I can, I sprinkle them throughout my conversation. But it is hopeless, I know I have no social skills. One has to learn how to get along with people, it isn’t an innate skill.
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Sister Mother by Yash Seyedbagheri
One day, you look for money in your sister’s drawers and you discover something else completely. You started out the day Nick Botkin, sister of Nancy, son of Penelope. Now Penelope’s your grandmother and Nancy’s your mother.
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Gameday with Gran by Shawn Nocher
“But why, Gran, why does everybody have to die?” He was only eight and it wasn’t like the idea was news to him. But it wasn’t something he thought much about until it got personal.
She only shrugged, advanced one of her checker pieces. “Pay attention.”
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The Ceiling by Charlie Rogers
She said she saw angels, and repeated it, so I did too, but I still haven’t grasped what it means.
I climb onto my bed, above the covers, and I gaze at the ceiling, yearning to comprehend it. This gray and dirty ceiling has hovered my whole life, floating above my bed. Built before I arrived, still standing after I’ve gone. Untouched, unchanged. Can I imagine a life without its ever-presence?
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Bathroom Throne by Yashar Seyedbagheri
Dad locked my sister Nan and me in the bathroom when he had girlfriends over. This was always late at night, after his shift at Bavo’s Bar. He thought Mother would have taken us when she left. I was twelve and Nan fifteen.
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George and the Horse by Jazeen Hollings
Huddled in the dark, the three children shook at the sight of the black horse. It’s head, bashed in from madness, left a bloody smear along the splintered barn wall. It’s body was too still on the dusty floor. For Walter, the blond-haired boy of four, it was just a rigid, mountainous shadow. It frightened him to watch the beast, the devil and his illness finally take hold of the animal. The silence that followed that was unbearable, unclear. Walter felt that something was very wrong but his innocence would not allow him to understand the stillness of the mare. As his unease grew, consuming his little heart, he buried his head into his older sister’s arms for relief.
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Goodbye by Frederick K Foote
My doctor says, “Zeeb, my old friend, your remaining days can be numbered in weeks, and not more than four. Then your Black ass is out the door forevermore.”
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More Ice Cream by Yash Seyedbagheri
The night they announce the divorce, my older sister Nan takes me for ice cream. I’m fourteen, she’s seventeen.
Nan insists I get two scoops. Mint-chocolate chip.
Nan has cookies-and-cream.
“Everything should be a little sweeter,” she says.
“I guess,” I say, hunched over the bowl. “You wonder what would happen if things were too sweet, right?”
Nan smiles, a smile as crumpled as a dollar bill. She has circles under her hazel eyes and I want to tell her something positive. I don’t know what.
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When the Tabloids Ate My Best Friend by Marco Etheridge
The morning sun assaulted every nerve ending in my shattered brain and that same vicious sun illuminated the headline that hovered before my bleary eyes: Bigfoot’s Miraculous Aqua-Baby Discovered. I tried to focus, then I tried to blink it all away. Miserable failure was the result on both counts. I did not conjure clarity, nor did the strange bedroom disappear. I was forced to ask myself that most critical question. Where the fuck was I?
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