Mud Season ReviewLittle Minnie I was a lion tamer. Rode on the back of firetrucks with dalmatians. Struck matches to light cigars that exploded. Jumped off a thirty-foot diving board and transformed into a life-size doll in mid-air. The director had wondered out loud: But what if she took the dive herself? Someone reminded him that I […]
Galaxies I sit in half lotus in the bedroom practicing my sitar, the most painful of all the stringed instruments. I imagine that Sally and I aren’t divorced but are raising a couple of teenagers—kids we never had—here in our maintenance-deferred bungalow. We are happy and at peace. A string snaps. Rummaging for a spare, […]
Radiant Drift Thirteen knocks on the front door, and you’re fifteen again. Twelve. Eight. Seventeen and scared to leave the cedars. Nine and peeling wallpaper in the office downstairs. Thirteen, and you’ve just come up with a secret pattern between you and your neighbour to know when it should be you to answer the door. […]
Artwork by Judith Skillman
Dove My mother peeled out. The back end of her car slid, screeched, righted itself in a furious spit of gravel. What might be, in a different car, an impressive display of wrath, in my mother’s 1992 teal VW Passat, was a carnival act, comic and grotesque, which made it all the more frightening. The […]
Artwork by Dora Ilce
The Things We Swallow By M.C. Schmidt Skeet has measured me, throat to naval, and he’s convinced I can do it. I’m of average height for a woman, so I was skeptical, but Skeet says it isn’t about height; he says I have a long torso, and that’s what’s key. I trust his judgment because […]
Artwork by Viviana De Cecco
Buying a Gun by James Cato I drove sixteen miles on dirt roads to the gun store and it only felt like betrayal because Olam didn’t know why I needed one. I’d brought up buying a gun over morning tea before, a what-if, dishonestly casual. He’d told me I might as well bring inside the […]
The Mango Cart By Jon Doughboy Over fateful margarita bowls the size of milk pails at Mi Bandera he expected his friend to wax miserable about her latest break-up per usual but instead she launched into recapping her recent dream: “Along a dim and dusty highway, I was shambling like some pathetic depression-era Okie,” she […]
Artwork by Sherry Shahan
When the Fence Came Down by Whitney Porter It was during the summer of 1987 when my best friend Joe and I first discovered our next-door neighbor Bambi Summerlin, a 16-year-old girl who had just flunked out of Sam Rayburn High, lounging nude next to a dented kiddie pool in her backyard. “I can’t see […]
Becoming Water Jim Marino She thought I must be a philistine or a fool to part with my books. Not even course books, but my own. “You can’t sell that,” she said, and came so close I could smell her leather and her sweat. “Don’t you like it?” “It’s wonderful,” I said. “I loved […]
The Woman in the Novel She knows it’s her. The hair color might have changed, a few mannerisms subtracted and added, but it’s her. He wrote her. He was her guest, and he wrote her. She feels violated. She tells people this. I feel violated. Some are sympathetic. Others pretend it. Only her husband actually […]
Wild “It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.” — Mary Oliver “You know,” Bets says, parking a wad of Bazooka in her cheek. “The road goes both ways.” She brushes a coat of Pink Lemonade high-gloss enamel on her big toe, sunglasses perched on the tip of her nose. Earlier, at Walgreens, […]
The Magician’s Doll When he was thirty-six, the magician took a wife—a plain and plump and doughy thing, because no one could possibly accuse him of being vain. On their wedding day, he made the water jump in heart-shaped arcs, and the flowers grow in gold, and even took credit for the brightness of the […]
Sisters of the Sacred Well The years of the pandemic, Colin’s mind followed the seasons: a whisper of renewal in the spring, hot streaks in the summer, desiccated thoughts in autumn, and white silence in winter. By the second summer of his bursts, we ceased hoping for rational time with him. We are not in […]
My Ghost Alessandra has been living with me for almost five years, and I’ve never been happier. In the morning, she likes to walk barefoot on my creaking floor, caressing my old bones. I love it. At lunch, she eats in the kitchen, with my curtains closed and light filtering from behind. I always keep […]
Final Molt Andy boils the cocoons and unravels the silk because he doesn’t feel bad about killing the pupa. “It’s not even a real bug at that point—the body is basically deconstructed, a chunky organ soup,” he says. I’m not convinced this means silkworms are immune to pain since organ soup doesn’t mean the worm has […]
Final Communion A biplane tails a shimmering string of text: The world is ending. Another, I hear, in Montana creates a font of clouds. Someone reported they added finally, but the letters dissolved before it could be confirmed. And I don’t believe it. That’s just what we’re all thinking. Finally. Finally, it’s over. In Michigan, […]
Field There was a girl who loved to play in a field. Every day after school, she would go to it and hide herself in the long waving grasses. The girl didn’t need any playmates, not when the grass welcomed her with each rustle and the wind soothed her with each murmur. She talked to […]
Four Paintings Jane could not stop thinking about her daughter’s painting. In the center of the canvas sat a large dog, a good likeness of their Golden Retriever Buster, except this dog’s coat was powder blue. Beside him on an unmade bed knelt a young girl wearing a hunter green jumper and red high-top sneakers, […]
The Empty Vessel The summer they drowned the hornet’s nest, I built my first urn. For months, the hornets had been at work, and now their nest hung in the oak tree round and smooth, like the bulbous heart of some prehistoric mammal. The nest frightened us yet still, I could not repress my fascination […]
Looking for Jimmy When I stuck the picture to the edge of the mirror, Maggie called me weird, which isn’t anything new, really. Seriously, B, that’s fucking morbid. I didn’t tell her what it was, its place in history, or that I’d found it in one those old glossy magazines in the basement that she […]
did it hurt when you fell one He stands on top of the diving board but never makes the leap. Other swimmers crowd forward, a bouquet of monochrome spandex scalps. He pays no attention to them. His eyes lift toward the moldy ceiling beams and dusty floodlights, a contented smile wreathing […]
Flowers for Allen My husband has a pocketful of pocket atlases, baby teeth and baby aspirin. They clank to the music his pants make when he shuffles and frictions against metal handrails. There’s dried blood on the teeth and he knows which tooth belongs to which kid by the grooves and faded Sharpie dates […]
Artwork by Despy Boutris
Hannie’s House Victoria So I get a call from the neighbor next door to mom—I don’t recognize her name or know for that matter how she got mine because I haven’t been able to bring myself to visit mom’s house since the last time we argued and that was so long ago—and she says […]
Artwork by Guilherme Bergamini
Golden Boys Two years ago, when Wei Seng told me that he was getting married in Melbourne, I had shrunk to the size of a mouse. He said, “We’re signing the marriage papers at the registry office and I’m back in the office the next day. There’s no reason for you to fly eight hours […]
