admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3, Author at X-R-A-Y

3 MICRO PIECES by Amy DeBellis

December 2, 2024 · Micros

Yakutsk Temperature dropping like a dive off a cliff. My lungs full of winter air, clear and sharp as ice. After the airplane and its stale box of other people’s exhalations, each breath is like mainlining oxygen. When I rub my lips together their skin is as dry as the snow beneath my boots. The salt of this morning still furs my tongue. My hands tremble brittle in my coat pockets, and my fingers rub the edge of a ticket, a mint, an obsolete coin. In only a few moments I will put my memories behind me and walk into…

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LOST HAM OF VIRGINIA by Joseph Young

November 29, 2024 · Fiction

That’s a dog, he said, thumbing a pink eyebrow. No, she answered, that’s a bear. Muzzle’s too long. That’s how they come around here. The creature climbed the far hill, cleaving the dew grass in two halves. It got to the door and pushed in, a clattering of end tables. Bears don’t act that way, he said. Dogs who act that way get taken off. He grabbed her by a hip, turned her around. Her nose was burnt so he kissed it. Like aloe jelly, she said. She pressed his dimple. Bzzt, she said. The bear or dog came out…

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EVIL, EVIL, EVIL: CHRIS KELSO’S ‘THE DREGS TRILOGY’ by Matthew Kinlin

November 26, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

“They say you can hide from Blackcap if you burn all your dreams.” – Alfie McPherson, Ritual America Chris Kelso’s The Dregs Trilogy (Black Shuck Books, 2020) is a triptych of novellas: Shrapnel Apartments, Unger House Radicals, Ritual America; where each part deepens and troubles its sibling. The book moves backwards and forwards through time and space, from the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a backwoods area near Winnipeg, to Louisiana and a number of other locations; some terrestrial, others interdimensional. Kelso’s trilogy revolves around a series of ritualistic killings. These murders appear to contain…

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ZOO DRINKING IN AMERICA by Avee Chaudhuri

November 25, 2024 · Fiction

Dutta placed a map of the zoo on the wall and reviewed the group’s itinerary. First they would shotgun beers in the parking lot, then visit the reptile house. There, they would shoot rum (hip flask left pocket) and handle the sloughed snake skin on display very delicately so everyone else would think they were respectable patrons of the Lincoln Children’s Zoo. Next they would watch the giant apes and pull bourbon (right pocket). It was rumored that the lowland gorillas were in a lustful and shameless mood of late. At this point they would purchase concessions to reduce the…

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DEAR PHONE MAN by Karris Rae

November 22, 2024 · Fiction

Hello. I am Roy Whitaker. I have mailed you before, or maybe not you but someone else at your office, because my phone has been disconnected. I think this is because you think I am dead, but I am not dead, so I would like you to please reconnect my phone. I am waiting on a call from my daughter and if I have no phone I will never get it. And I would shimmy up that pole and see if I could reattach it myself only I am pretty old anymore and I do not have a little neighbor…

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ON THE NOSTALGIA OF DRIED APRICOTS AND OTHER GARBAGE by Jeanann Verlee

November 21, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

I am 41. Standing at the Formica counter of a roach-friendly Queens apartment five lifetimes ago, I crumble gorgonzola over flatbread dough, then stud it with gems of diced dried apricot and fresh thyme—ready for the oven. The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures. Today I failed to provide the right sports drink, so I’m fucking stupid and goddamn selfish. Wordless, I return to the grocery, buy two six-packs of whatever he prefers. Something pink,…

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THREE WORKS by Myles Zavelo

November 20, 2024 · Fiction

My First Cousin Once Removed: Regarding Your Inquiry 1. Sure. 2. She’s still young, I guess. 3. She paints and wishes and likes fancy things. 4. Never believes me. 5. Teases me mercilessly. 6. Canned foods repulse her. 7. Pretends she can’t stand me. 8. Can’t orgasm to save her life. 9. Makes everything about herself. 10. Suffers from excessive jealousy. 11. Doesn’t have a family anymore. 12. Acts like she has no choice. 13. Knows how to seem extremely polite. 14. Has consistently failed to make a dent. 15. Always mad and sad and never the same. 16. Loves…

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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

November 19, 2024 · Fiction

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

November 18, 2024 · Fiction

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

November 13, 2024 · Fiction

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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