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Vesper was not a horse girl. It was not for lack of trying. She wished she loved horses as much as her ex-best friend, Holly. Holly, with her graceful legs, and a perfectly rounded head that looked good in any helmet. Bike rides be damned, Holly looked like her head was made to be protected, whereas Vesper felt like her skull was too elongated, too narrow, for any helmet or hat to fit.
Damn Shackleton and damn Amundsen and damn Hillary. All that attention, just for tramping around in the snow? I will show you how a real surveyor finds his glory. I will show you the stink and the viscera of glory. It is bone dust in the air, from a freshly sawed-open skull. Glory’s what I heap out of the brainpan with forceps and scissors and surgical knife.
by Kurt Fawver
The first child exploded in the parking lot of a nondescript fast food joint in one of the safest, most unassuming parts of our city on a clear summer evening. Beatrix Middleston (five years old, never stopped moving, loved butterflies and Spiderman and her cat, who she named “Dippers”), was skipping to her family’s car, one hand held in her father’s warm grip.
When I was eight years old, two things happened to me: I realized I wanted to hurt my cousin, and in that same moment God or the Devil or some other force in the universe kicked my consciousness out of my human body and into a fly that circled and alighted on her jam sandwich, circled and alighted, circled and alighted, tasting in the tentative way that flies taste.
by Daniel Roop
There was a door.
That’s the best place to start, I guess, given that there’s no good place to start.
Luke and I were drinking bourbon and smoking in his attic bedroom. He’d brought me to his family compound in northwest Wyoming right after we were discharged.
There is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, the hotel exists only in the moments where existence itself hesitates: between one time zone and the next, between the breath then the decision, between the life left and the one not found yet. It appears at the stroke of midnight for those who are neither here nor there. There are travellers mid-journey, refugees between borders.
by Quincy Lee
CW: none. My friend and client Hana, before she passed away, used to tease me about my fear of the dark. Hana was DeafBlind, and when I’d come to her home to work with her in figuring out some new appliance, or going through the mail, or whatever errands she wished to take care of […]
by S. L. Coney
I took the rats with me when Ilona kicked me out because I knew she loved them. She’d hold them, caressing their pink tails as she fed them pierogi, their large front teeth scraping against the pads of her fingers. Anton was her favorite, a big black rat that she’d stuff between her breasts and carry around the apartment while reading about microeconomic determinants.
Your companions drag the coolie girl to her feet. Some two-cent girl with rags for clothes and hair hanging across her face in tangled strings. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, revealing only the white crescents of her sclera. Blood trickles from a gash across her forehead. The ragged skin sickens you like the Devil. Her skull peeks through. This is a lynching.
The dryer groans to life, then begins thumping ominously. Maddie, already halfway out of her building’s laundry room, swears under her breath. The machine grinds and shakes. She slams the stop button, trying not to think about what the landlord might charge.
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