May 26. We limped out of the badlands at night. Las Vegas was a million screaming lights. The car almost crapped out at the halfway point, the fuel pump is shot. I was worried that we would break down in the desert and die of thirst. Sand would cover our bones and nobody would ever […]
Contributors 81
Julia Conover: The Voucher
“It’s Marge from accounting,” says the voice on the phone. “Oh, hi Marge.” I try to remember who Marge is. Is she the pudgy woman, about thirty-five, with the thin lips and grey-flecked sausage curls who stares at me in the elevator? Or the skinny redhead with pasty skin who always wears a Flyers jacket? […]
Eric D. Anderson: Strawberry
Hector came out of the gas station and saw that his date had driven off. Perhaps that’s it, he thought, perhaps it’s the Milky Way in my hand. Perhaps that’s the dealbreaker. Who eats these anyway, besides children? He stood on the curb and ran through the catalog of possibilities that could explain this development—a […]
Lauren Water: Now I Wonder
(Eurydice still in Hell) Now I wonder if he looked back on purpose to get rid of me and commit to living with grief, a less demanding companion. As he mourns me in solitude, the songs that cascade from the lyre make gods, humans, and animals intoxicated with sorrow. He wrenches water from granite and […]
Robin Beth Schaer: Contrition
A keening culprit, I came unzipped, unwed. My penance, to be province, to lie across a millstone bed, ground to powder, to be wife again. And you, my conspirator, my paramour, you strapped your longing to a sail, sent from town, sent to be lost. But trilobites cluster beneath your feet on mountaintop that was […]
Laura McCullough: Button
His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one […]