That’s what you get if you win a round the Samoan said after my right cross glanced off his cheek and his response shifted my nose from the center of my face to somewhere near my right ear. What do I get if I lose one, I asked spitting blood. I always had a big mouth. […]
Issue 86
Chris Brennan: Second Grade Sin
It took about a week for the Polish nun who ruled supreme over my 2nd grade class to notice I had stopped praying aloud like my classmates who dutifully repeated the Our Father and Hail Mary spelled out on the chalk board. She berated me with withering scorn as 29 other 2nd graders read […]
Elisabeth Geier: It’s the Mud, It’s the Mud
The summer the Mormons came to visit, my brothers and I took off before they had unpacked. The twins got my room. Uncle William took Mark and Andrew’s room at the end of the hall, with Ettie, his second Mormon wife. Second as in re-married, not additional. They weren’t that kind of Mormon. The kind […]
Christine Fadden: How We Stay Good Girls
I told my stepmother I was spending the night at Carla’s house and Carla told her parents she was spending the night at mine. Then we went with the boys up the mountain. The boys were brothers and—for a while—Carla and I were like sisters. Neither of us wanted to have sex, which is contrary […]
Jeffrey Colvin: Victuals
The teeth on the BSB-133 blade are induction heated, diamond crusted, sharpened to a flesh cutting five microns. When securing the ends of the blade to the spine of the hack saw, if you do not pay proper attention, nasty gashes sometimes happen. Bartholomew Evers (he knows the hazards) removes the blade from its cardboard […]
Morgan Parker: Poem
I know it takes seven years for our cells to change so I started last Thursday the train was pregnant with stillness and groceries so do you know what I thought? I wondered and then I thought I would be sick with the sound of your feet against hardwood coming to sweep up twisted spine […]