Issue #28
Your Brother’s Medium by Gail Anderson

Encaustic: hot wax tinted with pigment, and each week as you step through the door of his studio, breathing bees, balancing your basket of cleaning things and trying not to see the dark stain on the wooden floor, you understand a little more.

read more
Scars by Suzanne Hicks

We were never young like the other neighborhood kids. We were old like we had our own house key and knew how to boil noodles that we ate for dinner.

read more
Boilermaker by JW Goll

Butchie and I drive north on Water Street, heading into a sunrise that warns us to keep on our toes, this could be the day it all goes to hell.

read more
Clearance by Jeff Young

She cleared out dead people’s houses, kept something from every house – a spoon or a postcard maybe, once a Bay City Rollers badge, another time a glass swan — binned the rest of the menagerie.

read more
A List by Curtis Smith

I sat down to make a list of the reasons we no longer sleep together—but there’s no list, just the one thing neither of us want to talk about.

read more
Growing Through Grief by Angeline Schellenberg

When Leanna’s mother dies, her father takes up gardening. Purple loosestrife and puncture vines sprout from between his lips: winding up her mother’s tomato plants, covering Leanna’s window, clogging the neighbours’ eaves, injuring cattle and choking wetlands, blocking out the sun.

read more

After by Claudia Monpere

and after and after and nothing changes, just the names of the children. This one drew birds wearing hats. That one had an orange juice popsicle for an imaginary friend.

Mom’s new boyfriend is a liver fluke by Cole Beauchamp

He attached quickly (can I buy you a drink, let’s hook up, sure I’ll meet your kid), slid into our house unnoticed (toothbrush here, pair of socks there) and two months on, here we are, host and Fasiola Herpatica.

Husband by Sara Cappell Thomason

I want a house, a wife, a steak dinner and all my bills paid on time. I want to settle down in a house and get paid. Dinner from my wife served on time

The Bronze Medal by Vincent James Perrone

She wants to meet the pig—snout down, paraded through the town square of sodden earth and
stump dimples, now trailed by serpentine line of freshly showered farmer with tomato noses and
breath prematurely soured from all that auctioneer talk.

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.