Issue Forty-Six

My father moved into the soccer ball. We never knew how he got in there, no one did. We heard him yelling at us. T

The students of the college our company provided food services for didn’t want to see us anymore.

Sunday mornings we walk along the quay, passing the timber rafts, the river rats, the overpriced brunch spots with single word names.

At eighteen, I purchased a portal into the storybook from our neighborhood witch doctor. The off-season prices were a steal—$162, including taxes.

When the fish fell from the sky, Arturo hid behind the shed. Only the elders could catch them.

A week after their wedding, Beth and Spencer think about adopting a rescue so they go to the shelter but all they find are traumatized pit bulls and shivering Chihuahua mixes…

We paid the Home Depot, gave our number to the cashier to collect our stars, but apparently the employee had been using their own number to collect them, so we spoke to the manager…

The endgame brought the crowd to its feet. The red fox, tired down by the banderillas, was still livid, burning on a cocktail of traditional herbs and induced rabies.

He talks you through his bones, all 206 of them. The names you recognise — femur, clavicle — and the ones you don’t: hyoid.

My mother was visiting when she once spotted a coiled rope at the foot of my bed and assumed the worst.

I return my story to Customer Service, and they send me to the Muse Department where employees are busy stocking shelves. Everyone’s wearing nametags like Dénouement, Verisimilitude, and Narrative Mechanics, MFA.

While the moon took over the sun’s shift that had gone on long over the summer day and seemed never-ending, Kilguard and Sandy were walking down along the concrete boat ramp, down to the water’s edge.

t’s a dot between two big cities, this small whatchamacallit town of about 50,000, and its main asset is that it’s between those two big cities and not much further from other desirable places…

It was the arrival of the ancestor that did it. The breaking happened magnificently, as she would have expected if she could have expected anything at all in these times of upheaval.

At the beginning of a new episode during a Law & Order marathon, mom screeches out find the murderer. So I propel out the back door into unfilmed darkness defined by predator-on-prey guilt.

She vacuumed that morning. Sent two emails. Answered her daughter’s call. She had eaten something. Eggs, maybe. The light in the house was soft. It felt like a good day.