Archives

APPRAISAL by Sam Corradetti

December 31, 2025

I’m the ripped jeans and dirty flip-flops type. Vaselined lips, no eye liner. Zip-up hoodies and flannels looted from my father’s closet keep me mostly covered, worn loose enough to capture the coveted sirs and young mans while I navigate crowds at the deli counter. Weddings, however, mean dresses. As a bridesmaid, I am spared the search for some tolerable combination of lace, sequins, tulle, fringe, satin. Every detail of dress, hairstyle, jewels, shoes, nails, lip gloss, panties, and—ugh—strapless bra has been mapped out for me. The other bridesmaids crowd me, brandishing mascara wands and crimpers and elastics and hairspray

MEMOIRS IN THE MORAL MUD: DAVID LEBRUN AND JOSHUA MOHR TALK SHOP

December 30, 2025

My debut memoir, Delirium Vitae (Tortoise Books, 2025), recounts five months of hitchhiking and street busking I did from Costa Rica to Phoenix Arizona, in 2001, when I was broke and struggling with addiction and mental health issues. In 2020, I was halfway through editing my memoir, when the pandemic left me happily unemployed. I read Joshua Mohr’s Sirens and discovered he offered editorial service through his Decant Editorial. We worked hard on my manuscript for three months, but what stuck with me most was his encouragement and certainty that the book would find a publisher. Four years later, when

NOT EVERYTHING DIES IN THE DARK by M.M. Kaufman

December 29, 2025

For Ben There reality was, being all realistic, when it blinked out. One second I’m looking at Sammy and Joe sitting on the stoop in their church clothes eating deviled eggs and rice casserole off styrofoam plates, when suddenly they’re—not. They’re still there, but they’re in sweatpants and pretending to eat plastic corn on the cob. Then boom: Easter clothes and eggs again. I ask, Did anyone see that? All I get is shrugs. That’s the only answer they ever give me anyway. How’s ya’ day? Shrug. Wanna watch the game? Shrug. Whatcha wanna do with your life? Shrug. The

THE ANSWER by Maxfield Francis Goldman

December 10, 2025

“This is the last time I am ever going to do something like this to you,” Casper says as he takes his mom’s hand and kisses it. It tastes like cardboard, and smells like sheetrock. It’s rough on his lips and has this unbearable consistency he can only compare to dried dates. But she is beautiful, and everything about her is disgusting. Per usual, she is really not here, but she’s smiling this kind of absent-minded smile, but not really at him. Not really at anything. He lets his lips linger just a little too long. Hears ambiguous beeping sounds

STUFF YOUR FACE WITH SCOTT LAUDATI by Scott Laudati

December 9, 2025

A special offshoot of our Recommends series, where Scott Laudati enjoys the planet’s best foodstuffs and eateries. The Title Fight: Frank Pepe’s VS. Sally’s. New Haven, CT Once upon a time, back in the closed society that was 1990’s Staten Island, there was a wholesome order. Our fathers grew up in our houses before us and so we ate the same pizza on Friday nights they’d always eaten, because we were still Catholics then, and we didn’t consume meat on Fridays to honor Jesus’ sacrifice of his own flesh. You knew your local pizza guys by name, and if

XMAS STORIES FOR X-R-A-Y by Kevin Sampsell

December 8, 2025

These stories are from Kevin Sampsell’s new zine, The 24 Days of Xmas. New Smooth Santa Christmas was approaching, but Santa had no beard. He’d shaved it off that summer after his dog, Carol, gave him fleas. He thought he would be able to grow it back by the holiday season, but his face was still smooth as a baby. He couldn’t understand it. Long white beards ran in the family, from his father, Nick Sr., to his uncle, Walt, and brother, Richard. Even his sister, Nicolette, had a glorious white beard, which she often braided with garlic to

LOOKING AT YOU, LUCIEN by Isabelle Yang

December 5, 2025

It’s not fair that I get to be sick while my boyfriend gets to be healthy. Gets to live life horizontally—flat, always lying, perpetually still—bent in an angle like that of a slant. Like the longest side of a pudgy triangle, the hypotenuse, sinking slowly. Centimeters of neck crouching inwards—up and down—as he swipes his fickle dickle sucky whucky thumb—up and down—as he fries his brain—up and down. Tweet and twit and twat. Stick and root and rat. The kinds of sounds he watches, the kinds of sounds he makes from the other room. Our only room in our only

EARTHBOUND by Uma Payne

December 4, 2025

No one ever found him. Worms turned his whole body into the nutrient shit that plants need to grow. The plastic that had shared space with his flesh stayed. It sat still or traveled elsewhere. Where he had long since become indiscernible, it remained itself. It was outside of natural time, being that nature had exiled. Plastic was what had been severed from life, transmuted into another phase of existence beyond the metabolic processes that meant living. The accreting mass of plastic was nature’s obliterative tendency beginning to outweigh its reproductive one. Nature was poisoned by its own urges. Asphyxiated

AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR A COGNITIVE EMPATHY BROADCAST: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL RIEDL FROM BLOOD INCANTATION by Chris Kelso

December 3, 2025

Music is the shorthand of emotion. There is something intrinsic to the structure of it – with its overtures, rising crescendos, and authentic cadences – which seem to mirror our temporal patterns so effectively. Ethnomusicologists have divided the empathic processes of listening to (and creating) music into two categories – low-level emotional contagion (the unconscious mimicry of nonverbal cues that leads to synchronised emotional states) and high-level affective empathy (the ability to share in the emotions of other). Often the former ‘low-level’ state is achieved through listening to catchy pop music, or music which feeds the brain’s natural desire to

LET’S TALK ABOUT DESIRE by Dana Jean Rider

December 1, 2025

The woman in the window doesn’t know I’m watching her. Or, if she does, she’s fine with it, having assessed me as nonthreatening. I’m just the skinny white girl raking leaves outside her first-floor apartment patio. Hired-by-the-landlord equals vetted-as-safe. And she’s right, I don’t mean any harm—but it’s probably still weird how many times I’ve raked these particular leaves, which are now effectively mulch. She’s doing yoga in the middle of her living room. Not especially good at it, but she’s giving it her all, and when I rake really softly, I can hear her faint, vocal sighs of satisfaction