Mud Season Review
Unbecoming Doogie
By Storey Clayton
In retrospect, it seems likely that the school district administrators were bluffing when they recommended that I skip four grades. Oregon District 10 Superintendent Harold Riggan put the offer to my parents: “Storey is testing at an eighth-grade level…
Read more
No Baby, An Apology
By Bill Marsh
I dream sometimes about babies. I know these are babies I’m dreaming about because afterwards, when I stir awake with some semblance of recognition, I feel a hazy sense of having dwelled for a moment in fuzzy warmth, a zone of charmed interaction….
Read more
Keto Crash
By Lauren Mauldin
Last week, I dreamt I was eating a bagel. Not a New York bagel, the outside crisp and sprinkled with poppy seeds, toasted flakes of onion and tiny, square cubes of salt. No, the dense, bready pre-sliced kind you buy in plastic bags…
Read more
In Memoriam of Rust
By Alexia Kemerling
“I just have regular old fashioned music on the radio,” Mike says. “I hope that’s okay.” He adjusts the volume knob and the bass line of “Under Pressure” fills the van…
Read more
A Country May: 14 Days
By Chila Woychik
1. From the brash and loud, we seek the soft Midwest melody. This is less provincialism, more self-preservation. Years in the city left us numb and sightless; now, every new day brings startle and flux and a cold slap of air where we need it most…
Read more
Doll
By Melissa Goodnight
Dana worked the morning shift at Skaggs Regional Hospital. As far as nurses go, she was friendly and efficient. She was a sturdy girl, with gentle hands and a welcoming hug. In the early morning hours, as the sun made its slow climb from behind the clouds, Dana could be found shuffling cords and fluffing pillows…
Read more
Take My Hand So I Can Walk
By Peter Galligan
April and I are married, expecting a child. We’re at Denver Health, the city’s municipal hospital, for an ultrasound. The room is dark. April is holding my hand as I sit next to the bed. Being terrified of having a child to begin with, I sit silently with sweaty pits…
Read more
Spiritual Dissonance
By Shaun Anderson
The mission president told me I suffered from something called “spiritual dissonance.” He described it as a situation where what I know (I am a missionary, called by God, to teach others about the true church of Jesus Christ) and what I want (a relationship with a man) exist with internal discord….
Read more
Fireflies
By Wendy Fontaine
My daughter runs through the backyard of our rented cottage in Peachtree City, a southern town named for the fuzzy fruit that grow in every orchard. Stars appear in a darkening sky, and the air is sticky-sweet with the scent of magnolia…
Read more
The Measurer of Ruin
By Lynne Feeley
I am matching up misfortunes. In my left hand, I hold a Polaroid of a crumpled Saturn on rings of burned rubber and broken glass, while with my right, I tick through thick manila folders. I find the folder that matches the name my father has scrawled at the bottom of the picture….
Read more
Lingua Nova
By Mahdis Marzooghian
I Inpulsa/Negatio: I wish I could tell you I love you in every tongue ever spoken. Maybe then it will be enough. Maybe then it will convince you. Or maybe it will make up for the fact that I cannot be yours in this lifetime….
Read more
Everything Presses In
By Rachel Veroff
Swish. Swish. The morning sun flashes through birch boughs as I race my flickering shadow. Cold air stings my face, and my skis whisper across the icy crust of daylight like a blade being sharpened….
Read more
Bugs
By Naomi Ulsted
I was watching television when my dad barreled into the living room in his boxers. He twisted and shimmied and slapped wildly at himself, his hands clapping sharply against his pale skin. My mother was at Grandma’s house…
Read more
Blighted
By Elsa Valmidiano
Blight: NOUN 1. Any of numerous plant diseases resulting in sudden conspicuous wilting and dying of affected parts, especially young, growing tissues. 2. The condition or causative agent, such as a bacterium, fungus, or virus, that results in blight….
Read more
Dark Bodies
By Abi Newhouse
Olivia and I drove through the canyon in the dark. The only light came unnatural and electric from street lamps or the car clock or the bright headlights behind us. I followed the road, the curve of it, and the hill, and did all of this with tears dripping down my face…
Read more
Goodbye to All That
By Jordan Floyd
If Belle London were alive today, she’d be an intersectional feminist. She would frequent 25th Street in Ogden—where it all began, her Sin Alley, Two-Bit Street, the home of her once lucrative prostitution house…
Read more
On Weaving
By Jericho Parms
Lately, in the middle of the night, I wake up in a tangle between the cat and my partner, whose chest rises and falls with his measured breath. I still use the word partner although it sounds like we are police officers or share leadership in a law firm…
Read more
Gravity
By Meredith Boe
The planes over this city, they fly low. Above my bed, night or day, where I’ve spent my hours lately. The rush of vibrations gets louder, then softer, louder, then softer, like waves. When they’re really low, it sounds as if the sky is ripping in half. I go to work, read, drink too much, eat, make love. And repeat. Time feels wave-like, or more a whirlpool tub I can’t climb out of….
Read more
![Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://mudseasonreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution_2.jpg)
Honeymoon Reservations
By Nancy McCabe
The first time I saw a slide of Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” projected on the screen in art history class, Marc and I had been married for nine months and I felt like I was viewing a metaphor for my own life….
Read more
Bring Out Your Dead
By Rebecca Fremo
He repeats the lessons from yesterday: “Only aim at the target. Never touch the trigger til you’re ready to shoot the target. Never point it at people or up in the air. Animals could get hurt.” …
Read more
Reservation
By Andrew Maynard
I’ve seen tumbleweed before, but never this massive. They look like clumps of wicker, like loosely bundled strands of barbwire, somersaulting viciously across the asphalt and shrinking into the shrub-covered desert. “Goddamn,” my father says, squinting out the passenger window of my truck. “They’re not even this big in Westerns….”
Read more
The Funambulists
By Jonathan Rovner
Conjure up two people—let’s say one man and one woman—and place them in a nondescript room. Don’t slap them down like stamps in an album; people are fragile, after all. Fill the room with tension. The problem, of course, is that tension doesn’t look like anything. You might have to use your imagination. Maybe floodwaters are filling the room with a sluggish inevitability…
Read more
A Song for the Beautifully Useful
By Barry Maxwell
I discovered the clock radio in an out-of-the-way niche of Granny’s living room, wedged on a bookshelf behind a ribboned bundle of last year’s Christmas cards and a stack of miniature New Testaments. It was an early ‘60s model, a minimalist white cube atop a round footing, designed to look space-age and modern, with no place in Granny’s poor-folk country décor….
Read more
Cornucopia, Unincorporated
By Nancy Wyland
When I was younger, Dad often remarked about Cornucopia being “unincorporated,” as if this were a point of interest or amusement. I could tell it had something to do with the town’s size, but only after I looked up the word “unincorporated” did I realize the charming irony of a village proclaiming its independence within a town of 230 people…
Read more
Knives
By Lauren Spinabelli
The author has requested that this essay be removed. We apologize for any inconvenience….
Read more