Issue Thirty

You would be so surprised, I know, to learn the real reason I stayed with you far too long. One brisk October day a decade ago, walking up the steep slope of Eugenia Street, we passed a house with well-tended planter boxes. You glanced at the fuchsia nestled there and...

“When your world abruptly falls apart, inaction is a powerful counteract,” said the voice, once leaving the man to his empty room.The man walked the empty room, pacing its area as though studying it. The man did so until he became fatigued, ultimately falling asleep....

In first period health class, all twenty of us stood around the cow’s heart Miss Hutchings unwrapped on her desk. “Inside and out,” she said, “we need to know ourselves,” halving that heart with a scalpel to show us auricles, ventricles, valves, and the wall...

When mom would get tipsy, she’d tell this story. She had only one; beautifully embellished, wild with gestures, impeccable timing, and heart dropping punchiness.“It was a brutal labour.” She’d look around the living room and declare “You guys couldn’t begin to...

The writer had an idea for a story and took out his spiral pad and pencil nub from inside his ear and began to write about the phone call he received from a late-night TV host who said he was referred to him, read his collections of flash fiction and would like to...

~ Swans and geese hail from the same branch off the duck family. Over time, they, too, drifted apart. Lynne’s father said they could trace ancestors all the way back to the Mayflower. Fishermen and servants leaving an old land for a new land where they became...

I found Momma’s wig and green formal in her old trunk. She’d worn them to her last birthday party at DiFranco’s. After looking in the bathroom mirror, I imagined myself on a New York stage singing her favorite numbers. I performed “My Man” and voiced every word with...

He uncorks a 2017 bottle of Caymus Cabernet and pours out a story twice as old. Six words filter through. Six I want to unhear. Knife, nightArgument. Slashed, severedFled So many questions to ask once my thoughts unscramble, and stomach untwists. Only one makes it...

I become things. Today I become a staple stuck in a telephone pole, chewing its corner of paper. Tastes like missing puppy flier, honeyed with a crust of sadness. Not like the bitter root of ads for the neighborhood watch. Or the starchy invitation to a show by The...

Sometimes Kokoschka tells me I don’t exist. He whispers, you’re a transitionary object, dear doll, an illusionary surface, an overpriced representation of absence, and he groans into the feathery folds in my thighs and throws me to the floor. I was wrapped in tissue...

Before I leave you, I clean out my desk drawers. I no longer want to hold onto these things: Mr. & Mrs. rubber address stamp, sushi erasers you bought me even though I dislike seafood, unopened ovulation tracker. A film cartridge, black and white Kodak, 35 mm....

I see other girls like me, breathing their breath, their heads against the back seat windows, greasy imprints on the glass, their gaze on blurring buildings, boys on bikes, other cars. Chevy. Chrysler. Cutlass Supreme. We are behind our parents’ heads. For the moment,...

He rented a room on F Street, three days a week washing dishes at a local restaurant. The building he was in was broken. Small rooms split into smaller rooms by cheap drywall.Her room was down the hall. Someone he realized he knew. After work he stood outside her...

Archie's coat smells of old man and cat pee. You like to dip your nose down the sagging collar and inhale the earthy scent in the playground line. Others pinch their sensitive noses and make noises that tighten his fish-hooked jaw and turn his ears pink, but you find...

At first, the men didn’t understand. Sometimes the change would happen at midnight, and other times it’d sweep through at midday. They’d wake to a bed frozen over, or they’d frown upon entering the kitchen, finding lunch absent from the table. Within the house, at...

Taxidermied gimmicks on the inside, pretty little necklaces hanging from jackalope antlers, jewels like glass eyes. The corpse in the armchair, he’s very handsome. But the HOA must define “death” before you approach him so the body never leaves. Growing even more...

We are heat cranky, though we try not to be.  We sit in this hot room, hot because it’s South Louisiana, hot because it’s summer, hot because the air conditioner broke down. My mother carries a tray of sweet, iced tea into the enclosed side porch, usually...

The halo didn't work as scientists expected then, the crown of thorns did not pierce the star as intended, its insides did not spill out like a slit belly and dim its brightness.Awoken from its slumber, uncontained it reached octopus-like light tendrils around the...