Mud Season Review
This is How You Get Off Food Stamps
By Claire Robbins
1. First you will need to get on them. This is easy: move out of your mother’s house, live in a patched green army tent on the wrong side of town. Get pregnant. Forget who the father of your unborn child was but remember the shape of his nose…
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What Does a Nine Year-Old Know?
By Carley Gomez
“I’m a lesbian,” Tim’s nine-year-old daughter Sammy told him. She had a ponytail and a loose tooth that she flicked over her lip with her tongue as they stood in the aquarium in front of a tank of seahorses…
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Pool
By Stanley Delgado
Mom told Wendel it was like swimming in saliva, it was so warm; he would love it—absolutely love the pool. She knew he was on summer vacation, so he couldn’t say no…
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Last Sympathy
By Nathan Alling Long
SANUS DREAMT a bomb exploded just outside his apartment building. He heard the detonation, then saw the window shatter, the ceiling crumble, and debris scatter across the floor. He lay there naked, feeling the dust settled on his skin…
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Vernix
By Joe Baumann
The neonatal nurses couldn’t remove the vernix from Evan’s skin. They tried hot water, scrubbing with their hands through the squeaky latex of their gloves; they soaked washcloths, scratching them against his pink baby body, at first with a delicacy reserved for afternoon tea…
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How It Ends
By Rosanna Staffa
Stiff chairs, pens scratching. We sat at a large table, budding playwrights in summer clothes and fresh haircuts. The mentor looked tiny and mysterious, with beautiful black hair and delicate skin. I was afraid of her. She was terribly smart and famous…..
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Next of Kin
By Sarah Freligh
Richard Nixon is dying. The radio in Sophie’s car burps to life with this news, then mysteriously quits. A short in the electrical system, according to her brother Kevin, something tricky and too expensive to bother with in a car this old….
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Honey Bee
By Casey Lefante
You lift your scalpel, stare at the speck in front of you. You feel kind of bad for it. One minute, it’s living its life in a sweet little colony, making honey and shit, and the next minute, it’s dropped unceremoniously onto a tin plate for a fifteen-year-old to dissect…
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Here, There Be Dragons
By Jillian Merrifield
Dana and I are on this party’s shitlist, I can tell, and I’m pretty sure that it’s mostly about me. The host is the building manager of the high rise that Dana works in downtown, and he was so pissed to see that she’d brought an unsolicited male plus-one…
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Laura
By Florence Sunnen
I wake up to the phone ringing, and the sun wedges itself between my lids. I peel my cheek off the notebook page I fell asleep on. The ringing comes from underneath a pile of clothes. The light is deep; it is the afternoon. I dig around for the phone and answer…
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The Lady of the House
By Constance Renfrow
The noises upstairs woke Marla again. Her phone would read, she knew, 2:08 a.m.—the same as it had every night for a week. She pressed her face deeper into the bed sheet—the pocket of air beneath the covers warm and unmoving, safe…
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The First Task of Letting Go
By Christine Linn
I. Corporeality of action. The first task of letting go: righting bodies. If I found you, I would lift your one hundred and forty-two pounds of gangle easily. I would lift those one hundred and forty-two pounds of boy-smell t-shirts…
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Small
By Erin Seaward-Hiatt
The first mortuary gig was a rush thing I’d agreed to after my dream job of designing indie album sleeves stopped panning out. “Well, you get to honor families’ last wishes for their loved ones,” people say. “How honorable is that?” Really, designing headstones is just a lot of convincing people not to opt for the Papyrus heading…
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The Italian Dance
By Emily Alice Katz
Outside the sanatorium library, Evie spies a notice for a theatrical gathering. The announcement is written neatly on thick vanilla card stock. Sunday afternoons from two o’clock to half past three, it says. The words slope across the page from left to right. English letters, not Yiddish. Evie calculates: only four days to wait…
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Gaw Gaw
By Loan Le
On Halloween, the veil between the living and the dead lifts. That’s what Dad tells me every year, as if I need to be reminded, as if I can ever forget. Today is special….
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Wanting
By Noelle Q. de Jesus
Through this long summer, I’ve been desperately and quite pathetically in love with Eloisa Tuason, our neighbor from down the street. From the start, it’s been more than infatuation. Any man, married or not, can pass a woman on the street and think she’s gorgeous, and by the time he gets to wherever he’s going, he’s forgotten her….
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The Waiting Moon
By Thomas Benz
Jarrett wakes with the disorienting sense that he has missed something, that there has been some lapse and he must try to figure out what’s gone wrong. Passengers are wearily lining up in the aisle, jostled by the accustomed roughness of the old rails. The street and buildings out the window are upscale, mildly forbidding and unfamiliar…
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Winter Rose
By Vi Khi Nao
When it rains, which it hasn’t. At least not lately. But when it rains, which can be in the Spring or Fall, Nicole’s nipples become alert and her vulva swells up with clouds of feelings and illusions….
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!["Mystic's Revenge" by D.S West, Digital Multimedia (photography, drawings [pen and ink, marker, pastels], digital effects, and manual corruption [glitch])](https://mudseasonreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/west_mysticsrevenge-A2-2.jpg)
The Tall House
By Amanda Rodriguez
All the unmarried women in town lived in the Tall House. We called it that because the house rested high up on long stilts. There was never any danger of flooding, though….
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Victory Garden
By Brent Fisk
When I’m working in the garden in the heat of August, ripping out the plants that failed to thrive, I think of my grandmother under her straw hat, her small trowel in her hand and a red bandana knotted at her throat. She was partial to shade-lovers—hostas, creeping Jenny, and coral bells…
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Fly in the Ointment
By Nathan Leslie
Happiness is a place called Fawn Lake. Happiness is the rose-laden trellis by the pool, the gentle burbling of the hot tub; the pool dangles over the lake improbably. The sun glows delightfully—neither too hot nor too distant. Perfect sailboats dot the lake, their sails blowing in the ever-so-slightly wafting wind…
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Sons
By Caitlin Hamilton Summie
When I was eight, my father woke me in the middle of the night to watch a calf being born. I woke to the rolling, rich sound of his laughter, then boards creaking as he climbed the stairs. Before I could drift back to sleep on my warm, soft feather tick, my door opened. I smelled the cold air on him, a whiff of manure, and sat up in bed…
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June was Fierce, Simple
By Jessica Bryant Klagmann
It was really going on Thursday. Pietro went out in the middle of the night, not to see the stars but to water his plants. He wasn’t aware of the stars, not yet. He tripped over the hose. He swore the way his mother had taught him. As he sat in the dirt, smacking dust from his slacks, he looked up and noticed that indeed there were stars, many of them…
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The Record We’re Writing
By Tyler Barton
The Sunday after all this happened, the Gettysburg Examiner reported that Austin Harris flipped his go-kart six times. I was thirteen then, sensitive to nothing but myself, but now I wonder: why even include the number?…
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An Unknown Place
By Evan D. Williams, with illustrations by Meredith C. Bullock
It was the afternoon of the first moon landing and John D. Hinepaw Junior hunched in the loam of his backyard. He searched for chewed leaves on his bean plants and found none and then he blinked toward the fence posts now soft with lichen and resolved he would take no chances with the rabbits this year….
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