Issue Forty-Four

Is it about that check you saw? Listen, who are you to lay this on me on a Tuesday? Kate died. We fired the kid. Dan left for the Tribune.

It is with saddened hearts that the family of Brenda Lutrell shares that our matriarch has departed this world for greener and more heavenly pastures.

Jar-Jar will lead the first leg, where Clippy takes over. Freddy’s not really here but his hat and claws and melted face sure are—sometimes. We pull the double slit shit like every moment of every day so if CERN seemed too tame you might fit in around these parts.

Tory said it creeped her out. Not that his eyes were Magic 8-Balls, but that the message in them was constantly changing.

The two older brothers packed their mother into the backseat of the car between the twins, seat-belted her in, and drove to the Body Shop. Past the stores, past the tree-lined neighborhood, and past the tracks. Down an alley.

After Oxana Golden pulled the string that turned off the light, the three Orphan sisters lay on their backs and stared up at the dark.

It was Ina’s idea to camp out in the old Reynold’s place. Local legend was that it was haunted but Ina didn’t believe in “that old hoo-doo” and who were we to challenge Ina?

They came from everywhere. Wyoming and Brisbane, Stockport and Stellenbosch. They brought just the clothes on their backs, tearing off swastikas as they went.

ou start noticing on a Thursday afternoon that he is sipping away at your youth. He is collecting your twenty orbits around the sun like a ravenous spirit and you allow him to because he feels like a golden sage in an age of styrofoam lovers.

It must have had something to do with the sultry heat of Muskogee Pond—all the times we tried to escape the love-sweats inside Dirt Cheap Emporium.

Sam swore the security guards, the customer service agents, even the cleaners, were watching him while he waited at the airport for his flight and insisted the shoe store where he worked hired them.

So young you learn to crave the cold. All those strangers’ houses, crowded with strangers’ bodies.

Sometimes late at night, in bed, covers pulled up high, laptop on my lap, I open her emails.

The first time the sirens blared, we were at the ramen shop, happy to share a bowl because we were broke and in love.

You’re dressed like a pickle and you’ve never in your life felt such opulent androgyny. The pickle has green prickly arms and soft puffy hands and feet like two boxes of Kleenex.

There was nowhere to go but to the vanishing point, smoky at day’s end, the cloud-cover running out of fluff and optimism…

Our mother swallows firecrackers. Big ones, small ones, expensive ones, cheap ones, glittery ones and even noisy ones. You could say she had a call.