October 2022 Writing

The night Bib´s father gave him a Tracker a century of snow stormed our village. On the way down the empty main strip to the almost completely frozen lake we drank peppermint schnapps and picked up a hitchhiker. We smoked a cannon outside the boarded-up arcade while...

A fist shoots like a cannonball with fixed aim out of Locke’s dream like a thunderbolt. Locke wakes into an asphyxiates gasp, breathless, and in shock. His arms extend stiffly from the mattress to escape the blow. His mouth is bone dry and open.   The thrustee is...

Dressed for tennis, she leans against his open office door. She thinks it best to continue the argument later but then she just can’t leave it, feels compelled to ask the obvious question: “You haven’t actually been with another woman, have you?” Her husband waves his...

  The New Dark after Charles Simic   The stars know everything, even that there’s a sluiced tear in your heart, and that you will die before we turn twelve. But the stars are secret-keepers, the very best kind, which is not always optimum, for I won’t learn...

The Space Between by Kristen Henderson      The crook of my elbow stings, burns raw, as the bits of Ativan slide in.       “I go away quickly … I’m a cheap date,” my thick tongue spits out.        I use the “date” line every time the “happy juice” makes it way in....

To break down is what we’re designed for. Lungs, language, elevators. A person can only climb seven floors before they grow old, before they go extinct, and it’s me they call. Shaman, doctor, repair man. An elevator is a machine of vertical desire, weight and balance,...

Maya can hear them all downstairs. Royce was still here too. He just said goodbye to Maya up in her bedroom and now he’s saying goodbye to her mother in the doorway. Then everything goes quiet again, apart from her younger sister turning on the shower across the hall....

Here is the October Roundtable Writing!