X-R-A-Y LITERARY MAGAZINE | COLLECTION II | FALL EDITION
October 27, 2020
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TASTINGS by Colin Lubner
October 26, 2020
Nose So once upon a time this chick gets a job with her boyfriend at a liquor store and two months in he quits after some regular has a seizure and crashes forehead first into a refrigerated shelf of Sierra Nevada. In the incident’s aftermath she calls the drunk a drunk. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, deems the victim a sort of tragicomic invalid. And while they hadn’t contemplated separation prior to this fight, not once, this divide is by itself enough. He’s a romantic. She doesn’t know who she is.They are different people, he tells her. She agrees. This is some
ROADSIDE MELTDOWN AFTER ULTRAPLEX WEEKEND by Rebecca Gransden
October 23, 2020
Loose teeth in the hot tub. Sun on bug splatter eruptions. Bodies pile in dreamy aftermath. A bearded chubby man is in the summer house, performative human berserker, rewatching footage of a winter streaker. Somewhere inside the main house schoolgirls dance around a fish tank. Hairy boom licker in a sunlit bedroom, sweating to his parents’ bootleg. Too shy to risk playing his untitled demo, because it’s flammable. Twin motor lips frozen wrongly. Heavy. Smasher. Forever. Monster spinster reclines on a duck egg blue deckchair and sucks on a bombsicle. Sweetener for evil. The largest prescription sunglasses you’ve ever seen.
NO TAKE BACKS by Nikki Volpicelli
October 21, 2020
The phone calls and it makes me anxious. I mean the phone rings, a person calls. It’s been so long, I forget what to do. “Britt, you there?” I hang up. Princess. Who else? She’s the only one who still remembers the landline to my dad’s house. Her dad’s house. Ours. Was. Past-tense. She calls back immediately, and this time I know better than to answer just because it rings. I haven’t talked to my sister in 10 years and I don’t plan on starting now. It’s not sibling rivalry, not just two girls fighting over a boy. Sure, back
SMACK by Chella Courington
October 19, 2020
Meet me @ Aquarium, he texted. By jellyfish, 7. She would perhaps, most likely, but not before researching jellyfish, for she knew his habits, the way he liked to make it impossible for her to say no wherever they were. Adults spawned daily if given enough food, and for most, spawning was triggered by dim light so the entire population bred every day at dawn or dusk, floating through water, dropping eggs and sperm, tentacles (though she preferred tendrils) never touching. While most men she’d known like to roll against her in the morning, he was a night creature. Fortunately,
FRIDGE by Xueyi Zhou
October 16, 2020
Say you just move into a new apartment. A freshly finished apartment with a lingering smell of paint. The apartment is not big but it’s your own, and that’s something. You work hard for it, wall by wall, for a tiny cell in a honeycomb. However, a bare box with only a man inside seems more like a lock-up than a lodging, which means now you need appliances. Your choices are limited by the small space and your thin wallet. But you decide to treat yourself, to get something nice. To make it cozier, more like home. You are torn between an air-conditioner and a fridge.
MALE ENDURANCES by Nora MacLeod
October 14, 2020
My college friend asked me out for drinks and named a bar equidistant to our offices and apartments. The last time I went there a dentist had hit on me with his Argentinian friend who claimed he worked for the CIA. The time before that I’d fainted on the sidewalk during a first date, it was the best date of my life. Arriving at the bar, I felt as though I was returning to the dumping ground of a dead body, coming back to touch his hair and maybe sit on his rotting face. In a dream I felt I
ALTO by Kathryn M. Barber
October 12, 2020
We’ve spent this summer in your house, the one that belongs to your father, the one that’s brimming to the top with a hundred thousand ghosts. Memories haunt this house: your parents, still together; your brother, asleep down the hall; your college girlfriend, alive, her laugh echoing across the staircase. We sleep beneath a framed photograph of that girl you loved so much, the one whose car went off that bridge we drive across every day. She’s the only thing that reminds me you’re capable of love, that it can even exist inside you. The way you grieve her is
QUEER VISIBILITY by Brooke Kolcow
October 9, 2020
I disappear in large groups. -John Elizabeth Stintzi, circa 2014 I know it’s starting when my legs begin to prickle like they’ve fallen asleep. They fade away and no one notices. My arms go next, numb from my fingers up to my shoulders. The beer I’ve been drinking falls to the floor and I wince. The bottle bounces once and rolls across the kitchen linoleum. Without legs, I can’t bend down and without hands, I can’t pick it up, but at least this time it doesn’t shatter. Once, at a Halloween party in grad school, my cocktail glass broke when
CONDEMNED by C. Cimmone
October 7, 2020
My mother smoked her favorite cigarettes in the kitchen. Smoke billowed out into the living room and crept down the halls. A small television muffled the evening news as the three of us chewed away at overdone meat. Splatters of hot bacon grease slid down our throats as my father hurried through tough threads of roast. He ran the tractor after supper; and my mother splashed hot water around in the sink as she yelled at me for not finishing the black-eyed peas. “Black eyed peas are good luck,” she’d belt. Holiday evenings were much the same. “Too much sage