Deinotherium giganteum: enormous terrible beast, elephantine mammal whose nasal cavity might have been the socket of a single, giant eye. The ancient preoccupation with largeness: identifying what was great enough to build with stone, to rope arrangements of earth that from hundreds of feet up show us dendrites and quipu, impossibly sharp lines and angles. […]
Issue 95
Matt Yurdana: Her Boyfriend’s Frogs
It’s been six months now, long enough for her to question what she’s done. She’s somewhere between calling it off and convincing herself it still might work if she can understand it, if what she finds is worth understanding, and she catches herself wondering if there’s a single event: a sour romance or a childhood […]
Keith Woodruff: Bride of Frankenstein Blues
Consider the moon, my friend, how its absence conjures this unromantic air. Here in the bar, smoke unwinds like bolts of slow lightning across the gauzy light; everywhere you look mouths, small dark graves, chew on drinks. Now the music gropes its way through the crowd looking for phone numbers, drags itself onto the wooden […]
Tria Wood: Godzilla Walks into a Bar
Godzilla walks into a bar. He’s much smaller than you’d expect, really. Scaly, dark, and haggard. He’s been sleeping it off for centuries, all that rage, dust and ashes washed out of the cracks in his suit by the surging Pacific. He’s graceful, surprisingly so. Swanlike, even. He will not look at you. When he […]
Dana Sonnenschein: Creature from the Black Lagoon
My neighbor leads a life of fiction and once in a while invites me in—to make believe she’s got a spotless apartment, a couple kids, religion. It’s hard to keep up with the plot. The radiator hisses like a cast-iron snake. Or the kitchen faucet drips, and a roach slips out from under a plate. […]
Brittney Scott: After the Hunt
Here’s the body the dogs robbed— the limbs strewn around the field like prophecy. She won’t make it, they say. They say the body found in her bed was eaten right through to the floral mattress. They had to shut her eyes because she would not stop blinking up at a bone marrow colored sky, […]