Issue Twenty Five

In my other life, the one I never got to live, I’m a silver-haired woman with six grandchildren, and I love them all. Not in the precious, clinging way my daughter loves hers, or the office-manager love my son doles out in little chits, like badges for good behavior....

           Here there are tornado warnings every other day. The winds pick up, the leaves spiral tightly around themselves. Shingles threaten to snap from the old family home. Every other day, she wonders which version of her husband she will receive, which version of...

“Let each sentence ride its own bus.” Meg Tuite Each sentence rode its own bus, all headed for the same destination from different directions, at least that was the plan, but there was always the possibility that a bus would break down, or get lost, or mysteriously...

One day Brittany opened her boyfriend Shane’s dopp kit, searching for eye drops, and found a freezer bag, rolled up like a scroll. Inside the bag was what looked like a carefully snipped off face, with holes for the eyes and nose. The face was thin, yet fleshy. There...

I heard she’d been standing in her garden, observing the mint when suddenly her feet took root and she became all linden, no oak, lonesome arms twining. Dressed in black, I visited her. Brought a cigarette and poured beer over her bones. Curled around her trunk. The...

It was a scorching summer night, which meant we had two choices: keep the window closed and fry in our own sweat, or open it and allow the stench of death and decay to wrap itself around us as we tried once again to make a baby. When we moved into our dream home at...

Twelve larger-than-life characters queue in the wings – masked and appropriately distanced, naturally.  They’re ready to take the stage (pending enthusiastic consent from the stage) for a livestream ‘Broadway’s Back!’  performance/conversation entitled ‘21st...

You lose your virginity to the sweet, fast talking brunette girl from AP Calculus class, in the stacks of the high school library. You get married/break up. You lose your heart to the English Lit major who wrote her thesis on the importance of Precambrian quartzite...

You’ll approach me lanky-limbed and jaded, already wishing time would slow or stop, and I’ll suggest we pore over photos from when you were a baby. I’ll hand you my phone, and as you scroll through the years, you’ll pause over a series of images centered around a...

Raylene lived with her Mawmaw in a weather-beaten house on a red dirt road where the guttural hum of a bluesy organ streamed out the open windows into the shimmering Mississippi heat. She was older than us, with Slinky-like chestnut curls that bounced like thunder...

At lunch, I sit down in the break room and see that I’ve got some unread texts from Kyoko. Today’s her day off so she’s painting again, more still lifes of spicy chicken sandwiches from Wendy’s.             How...

In the waiting room, we of advanced maternal age spy over barricades of open magazines. Which body among us will accept implantation? Who of our ancient sect will allow modern medicine to age us backwards, reproductively speaking? I count six, including myself....

RADIO Again, I wake up to Adult Contempo. Taylor Swift eakling into my dreams. Why can’t I grow up, I say out loud to my husband, who is already in the shower, steady thrush of water. He doesn’t need an alarm. Love, he says, is what jets him out of bed. I want to...