The first time I did it I was seventeen. Johnny and I had been planning it for months. It was a Saturday, and the sky was that kind of crazy deep-blue that makes you think of tea cups, then your mother, and before you know it you’re sitting under an imaginary apple tree watching your […]
Fiction
Andrew Spear: Run Over (Witches, Chicken)
That was the day I was run over. Actually it wasn’t just me, but it was mostly me. I was standing closer to the car when it hit us — I was the one it actually ran over. She just bounced off the bumper. And then there was all the fried chicken — but I’ll […]
Joan Harvey: TEX(ts)
1. The White Geisha He is a man in his forties with a strong unlined face, just the faint traces of teenage acne scars, light skin and light hair. On Halloween he is allowed to wear the white silk wedding dress of a Japanese woman friend of his. She fixes him a wig of dark […]
Kim Church: Bullet
I know what a bullet can do. Everybody has an idea, everybody’s seen close-ups—gaudy wounds, geysers of blood, arms and legs flopping, life kathumping to a close. TV-bullet drama. But there are other, not-so-spectacular ways a bullet can work. My husband wore a bullet on a chain around his neck. He had blond chest hair, […]
Josh Goldfaden: Top of the List
When the manager on duty, Tom Bogan, tells Mary that Bruce Springsteen is coming in and he’s seating him in her section, she’s not at all surprised. Their lives have always been linked and she knew someday they’d meet. She wasn’t just Mary Rosenthal of Freehold, New Jersey (birthplace of Bruce Springsteen), she was the […]
John Hennessy: Matryoshka
This morning the exterminator caught me loafing over a box of old love letters from Sophia, the last thing left to unpack. I liked him so much I had half a mind to share them with him. He marched in smiling and whistling, hoisting his shiny brass gear over his shoulder, a compact and chipper […]