Issue #16
Walruses on a Beach by Julia Strayer

A couple months after Buddy’s funeral, his brother and I are staring at stars, from inside an old bath tub someone dragged to the beach, pretending we’re at an ocean instead of a lake by drinking rum and Cokes from old yogurt containers.

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Tom Thumb by Sandra Arnold

He slid into the world with no warning, landing on the bathmat as I stepped out of a hot shower. He was so small his skin hung off his twiggy limbs like an oversized suit.

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Visiting Day by Lori Sambol Brody

My mother rolls curlers in her hair, makes me wear my apple-green High Holy Days dress, and we cross the Golden Gate Bridge in her Buick Regal to see Charles Manson.

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Words by Leonora Desar

I’m in bed and then I fall right through the floor. It happens without warning. One minute I’m in bed with my husband, not having sex, and then I’m in bed with the new neighbors.

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Stain by Patricia Q. Bidar

Tom’s Firebird pulls into Alice’s street of windows lidded with wooden and peeked-through blinds. In the kitchen, Alice’s mother stops her dishwashing motions, then resumes.

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What Would Marlene Do? by Laton Carter

It was raining, so everything was perfect. I am Marlene Dietrich said the man. He was standing next to the window, and the rain, as rain is supposed to do, slid down the pane like tears in a movie.

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Midnight Spoon by Kathryn Kulpa

Midnight, and Frank is burying spoons again. He doesn’t know I dig them up, hours later, after I’ve put him in bed with his pills and sippy cup, after I’ve checked under the bed for CIA agents, opened the closet door to show him no Russians are hiding there.

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Held by Daryl Scroggins

Even as a child she wanted to lie still in places so close to human routines as to be invisible. Places that offered a vaguely alarming anonymity.

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Laws of the Wasteland by Sarah Daniels

Mikey’s pink tongue laps at the blood from his nose. In the long-shadowed afternoon we trudge, weighed down by books, and sports kit, and the coats we’ve shed to fit this week’s trend.

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Carry On by Lucinda Kempe

Once there was a man who loved his donkey, but his donkey didn’t love him back. The donkey loved an eggshell, but the eggshell didn’t love it back.

Prudence by Christy Stillwell

They put the shock collar on the boy and that was it for the nanny. First they put the collar on one another. They were professors in English and Philosophy, all of them smart people.

You, Visitor by Jane O’Sullivan

You don’t like her much, not that you can tell her that. Slugging along behind you, hands in pockets. Sullen as a fish despite the fucking dawn rising over the city, the glory of it.

Rosetta Post-its by Guy Biederman

Los Gatos Tienen Hambre, says the post-it on the fridge. Since when did the cats learn Spanish, since when did they learn to write? The same could be asked of you, says another post-it.

Gallows Pole by Kathy Hoyle

In the dead of summer, while the whiptails hide in sagebrush shadows, and everything blisters in the amber heat and there ain’t nothin but buzzards hummin for miles around, a hanged man dances on a gallows pole.