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MY HEART BELONGS IN AN EMPTY BIG MAC CONTAINER BURIED BENEATH THE OCEAN FLOOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH HOMELESS by Rebecca Gransden

Have you ever found yourself adrift, without a clue on how you got there? The blue whale is the largest mammal to have existed on our planet. A small person can fit inside a blue whale heart. In My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor (Clash Books, 2024) Homeless contemplates the messiness of a heart ready to overspill with sadness, a sadness drawn from fathomless wells, deep and lightless as the bottom of the sea. How many fast food containers have already made it to that desolate ocean floor? I spoke with Homeless

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WHAT WE REMEMBER by Jorden Makelle

What you remember is riding scooters around the cul-de-sac on sun-soaked summer mornings. Me pushing you on our swing set in the backyard. A scruffy white dog lapping up water, its tail wagging. Her blessing the food, pork chops and green beans and cornbread. Running under sprinklers barefoot, tufts of grass tickling our toes. Red and blue and white popsicles staining our tongues. Him lowering the basketball goal in the driveway so you could play. Saturday morning cartoons and chocolate sprinkle donuts. Sunday morning church and lunch at Luby’s.   What I remember is always sitting quietly, so very quietly.

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BEAUTY QUEEN by Sam Pink

We’re eating chocolate cake for Ronni’s bday after work. At a table in the hay barn that serves as my boss’s office. It’s me, Ronni the team lead, my boss, and her two teenage daughters who barback/take out garbage. I’m covered in mud from the waist down because my boss’s youngest daughter took an ill-advised shortcut with the golf cart during a garbage run. So I went out and helped, lifting the back and pushing forward while she gassed it. ‘You’re buying him a new pair of pants,’ my boss says, eyebrows up. ‘Okayeeee, jeez,’ says her daughter. She’s been

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STATIONS OF THE CROSS AS PERFORMED BY A 6TH GRADE CATHOLIC EDUCATION GROUP FOR A SMALL CONGREGATION ON THE THURSDAY BEFORE EASTER by Michael Harper

Jesus is condemned to death Mark is desperate to be crucified. He’s been acting especially pious this week. Smacking his cheeks to make them look ruddy and hallow. Doing push-ups before rehearsal. Crafting his body into a canvas for suffering. The other boys and Julie volunteered to be Roman soldiers. Cardboard swords clash dully. I should have tried out for Pilate. One scene then done. But my reputation isn’t good enough to condemn Jesus to death. I miss months of masses in a row. Crucify Him! rings out from the class. The trial seems rigged. I feel for Jesus even

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FRACTURED by Lana Frankle

The existence of a Neural Correlate of Consciousness that persists after the administration of anesthesia is such anathema to the established position taken by physicians of the modern age that publication of any supporting data has been effectively relegated to the annals of pseudoscience. This is despite the clear and alarming implications of not one but several studies attempting to chronicle the experience of the Fugue. As a man of science I at first balked, predictably: if overwhelming and conclusive evidence is rejected by the likes of Nature and Science than I as an individual bear no responsibility for its

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THE VARIANT by Lana Frankle

In the months since The Visitation there have been ceaseless efforts by the Department of Defense, including within my own division at DARPA, to develop strategies to either obliterate and neutralize the foreign Entities, or (in my own research lab) to counteract or mitigate the seemingly inevitable effects they have on human observers. Thus far, efforts to kill or immobilize these foreign agents have been largely unsuccessful, and this is due mostly to the lack of techniques for localizing and targeting them in ways that circumvent the need for soldiers or others to perceive them. The use of infrared goggles

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Dave Fitzgerald Recommends: Etiquette, Shit List, and The Berlin Wall

It’s election season! Of course, it’s always election season now. And for anyone young enough to not remember life before the internet, it’s pretty much always been election season, and maybe always will be. The very idea of it being a discreet “season,” separate from some other stretch of time in which elections are not happening or being talked about, likely makes little sense. I’m actually a few months older than current Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance (a first for me), and even I can only vaguely recall the pre-infinite-screaming-doomscroll-chyron version of our American Democracy in action. What’s more, the

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(TEAR DOWN) THE OPRY by Carolynn Mireault

On their first night alone together, Anne Cowan has gas, and is the type of modern woman to announce this mid-noir, center candlelight, right as Robert is pushing aside their T-bones. Tonight they’re Clean Plate Rangers, having tested each other’s manners—wrong knife, tines up, napkins on the table—but zilch, he’s certain, could have girded him for this. “What would you like me to do about that?” “Nothing, I guess,” she says, “unless you have something. Do you have anything? Phazyme?” They’re at the El Dorado Bed & Breakfast halfway between Carthage and Sedalia. This alone required some finagling, a detailed

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I SEE A FIRE AND I TRUST IT: An Interview with Charlene Elsby by Matthew Kinlin

Matthew Kinlin: In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death states to Max von Sydow as the medieval knight: “Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.” Your new collection of stories, Red Flags (House of Vlad, 2024), offers characters the opportunity to think about their own deaths as experienced, often occurring in gruesome and funny ways. What motivated you to write about this confrontation with death and non-existence? Charlene Elsby: Hello, Matthew! It’s funny I should hear from you just now, which I’ll explain in just a moment. But first the answer to your question. I was at home when

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THIS MINE OF MINE by Brandon Forinash

You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my

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