Archives

NIGHTHAWK by Zach VandeZande

May 21, 2019

There’s a yellowy light. It’s not fluorescent. This is not the IHOP. It’s the other one. The local diner. Yellowed sign, yellowed menus, yellow, yellowy light. _________ Nothing that happens here is important. Important is elsewhere is the point of a place like this. This place is meant for in-between. _________ She is at the hostess station looking lost. Looking like a customer who doesn’t know if she should seat herself. The post-bar rush is over. A last-call-at-2am town in a last-call-at-2am state. But: it’s later than all that. There seems to be no one in the restaurant at all.

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AJAR by Ankita Banerjee

May 19, 2019

He was at the counter flirting with a pixie cut. My eyes followed him the whole evening and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I ordered my fifth gin and tonic, and when Sofie asked, “Why don’t you go talk to him?” I sniggered. It started raining outside – the worst kind. He was now purring to the little black dress at the corner table. She was small, with a little hunch on her back. I went out for a cig and argued with the voice in my head. “Perhaps it’s life coming to a full circle.”

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GOOD BOY by Kailash Srinivasan

May 17, 2019

It was a mistake trusting your parents will come back to get you. It was a mistake turning your back to them, clapping idiot-like at the spinning top that lit up red in the dark. They left for Bombay, leaving you behind in Delhi with your grandma, your paati. Its summer—the city is a furnace, everything is melting. Your paati slips in the bathroom and fractures both her legs. With weights, pulleys, her legs hang in the air, like the hands of a clock: 2.10 p.m. Her loose, burnt-brown flesh hangs loose from her thighs. In brown shorts and a

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GNOSTIC BAPTISTE by Gregg Williard

May 16, 2019

“I found him.”  “Him who?” “Gnostic Baptiste!” “The spam tag?” “It’s not just a tag!  I wasn’t even running a simple traceroute function before I get a local postal address. So I go there…” “Wait a second.  I need a beer for this.” Alex and I had worked together for 3 years out of the Attorney General’s Office, doing tech consulting for an anti-spam task force.  Alex was one of the best systems designers I knew, parlaying hacker-honed skills into the legit and the lucrative. But the thankless and poorly- paid search for spammers had become his holy grail. I

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LEPIDOPTERA by Shelby Colburn

May 15, 2019

She told me she caught a moth in her throat. We sat in a roadhouse munching on fried pickles as snow fell past the window. She reached into her mouth with a finger and pulled her right cheek to the side like a hooked fish. I leaned closer to her face and peered down her mouth. There it was, a grey moth lodged in the opening of her throat. Its small wings fluttered behind her uvula and tonsils. She popped her finger away, closing the opening to the moth’s new home. “It chose me,” Priv said as she attempted to

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TO CUT A WIDE SWATH by Therese White

May 14, 2019

I smell ammonia. Old people. We visit Great Aunt Alma for no reason. It’s Sunday, reason enough. Her room: a single cell, a single window. The bed backs into a corner. Her white bedspread, a canvas. Little blocks, cut from her underwear, lay stacked: pastel patches. Her arthritic finger points to them. Her mouth opens; no words exit. Tan knee-highs choke her calves. Her strap slips off her shoulder. Her feet are firmly planted in sturdy, black loafers. My grandparents are not surprised; they are blasé. I stand mute, wondering what language Alma is forgetting: French or English. My plain

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THE HEART OF MORALITY by Austin Ross

May 13, 2019

Daddy’s monster is back. That slightly musky scent of sawgrass wafts in across the Everglades as he slides a single bullet into the revolver. This is what I remember, all these years later. This incident with the revolver is familiar to me, a nightly ritual to cap off our evenings of foil-wrapped TV dinners and, for him, nearly a third of a bottle of whiskey. I have learned by now to keep silent during the ritual. As he examines the revolver in his hands, polishes the silver of the barrel with his sleeve, I think: he isn’t such a bad

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SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY LIFE by Meeah Williams

April 26, 2019

I could sense it coming like a mule senses thunder. I had his cock in my mouth and I was trying to keep my neck from being too traumatized when he bucked his hips in short hard thrusts. It was like being a passenger in a car whose driver proceeded down the street by slamming on the brakes every three seconds. I’m getting whiplash just thinking about it. I watched people on the sidewalk stop, stare, and the expressions on their faces said “What the hell is that all about?” I leaned out the window and threw confetti at the

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