ISSUE #26
Catherine Parnell
Embouchure
There comes a moment when there’s nothing left to say, although if you asked Margaret, she’d tell you that’s nonsense. So, when eleven-year-old Trina clammed up and didn’t speak for an entire month in early summer, we wondered why. Margaret, older by a year and with questionable wisdom, swore she’d get Trina to talk and she had plenty of opportunities to do just that. Each attempt met with dusky quiet…
Karen Arnold
Map Reading for Beginners
I am not convinced we will make it to the top. The engine of our camper van whines and complains. The dog is shivering on the floor, mute reproach in every glance of his white rimmed eyes. You rest your hand on my arm and grin, flashing uneven white teeth, push your sunglasses back onto your head, to hold back sunshine orange curls…
Allison Field Bell
Break
How to write this country without writing chestnuts. Roasted and cracked, folded into paper cones. Our bodies slight and young and female, in a trot across ancient Turkish cobblestones.
Yesterday: the ferry to Asia, dark water choppy at the bow, sky a polluted haze. Today, by the Blue Mosque, you ask me how it feels to be a Pisces…
Drew Coles
Sleeping Over
Me and June are making out on the couch in the dark, while Taylor and June’s sister are in her mom’s bedroom with the door closed. June says kissing in the dark is more exciting than doing it in the light, but I know the real reason: She’s worried about the zits on her chin…
Emily Fernandez
But Not for Me
She pulled up to the sidewalk in the early evening. It was almost dark, the year approaching winter solstice. A lamp from inside his window shone through the threadbare curtains highlighting the cacti and weeds that grew up along the edge of his triplex…
Diane Josefowicz
The Wedding Photographers
At a small wedding, certain details are hard to miss—like who, besides you, is carrying a camera.
It’s a serious rig, heavy with extra lenses. The sort of rig that makes the shoulder dip…
Lisa Thornton
Pears, Parmesan, Pareidolia
The man at the grocery places a pear on top of the soup at the bottom of her paper bag. He doesn’t have to do that. Not all of them do. Some of them pack willy-nilly, the produce brown and squished by the time she gets home…
Helena Aeberli
Reflection
She had once read dozens of books a week, now she occasionally leafed through the Waterstones pick of the month, lying on her stomach and dog-earring pages. She was gaining weight in a way she never had before, and wondered whether baby fat was always something one lost…
Joe Baumann
This Has Nothing To Do With You
Your father decides to go on an all-exotic-fruit diet. He invites you to the first dinner, and the explosion of fuzzy skin and pulp covering the kitchen table looks pornographic, weird growths looking both phallic and vaginal. You pick up a strawberry and take a bite, then poke the exposed interior flesh in his direction…
Patrick Cash
The Wolves
Coco turned up late and was ushered into the restaurant bar. Her usual bartender would have begun mixing her cocktail when she passed the doors but there was a new recruit there, staring at her ballgown…
Lauren Davis
Cleaver Road, 2014
Firepit where we burned trash—we weren’t meant to. The avocado green refrigerator that hummed excessively loud. Three lines of ants that—stubborn, busy, would move over only an inch when I scrubbed the floor. I’m lying. I scrubbed around them…
Suzanne Hicks
Are You Lonesome Tonight?
I’m dating the last Elvis in Las Vegas. There used to be an Elvis impersonator just about everywhere you went in town. Bedazzled jumpsuit-wearing Elvises posing for photos with tourists on the sidewalks along The Strip and Fremont Street. Caped Elvises performing wedding ceremonies in little chapels. Young Elvises and old Elvises singing in countless casinos. But not anymore…
Cecille Marcato
Frank’s Last Drink
It was downtown, on the East Side where all the bars are and the nightlife, but it was afternoon. He wasn’t in jail. Obviously. It had been a close call until his lawyer urged him to accept court-mandated rehab. But that was for coke, and he was still drinking. Vodka, mostly. Well drinks…
Robert Crossley
Romancing the Moon
Christopher Cokinos, Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow.
…His new book about the moon links the history of scientific discoveries about the world next door and its history in the human imagination with passages in the author’s life, including his childhood fascination with the night sky, his much later and more passionate engagement with telescopic study of the moon, and, most notably, his reconciliation with his long-estranged father who was in a lingeringly fatal struggle with cancer as Cokinos struggled with the writing of Still as Bright. When he studies the barren and lifeless moon—a premonition of the future of our own planet—as his father lay dying, “entropy becomes personal.”..