admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3, Author at X-R-A-Y

GREEKS by Caitlin Boston Ingham

October 15, 2024 · Fiction

My daughter-in-law Susie bought me a voucher for an adult educational course at the local evening school. Susie had studied herbalism there last year. She suggested I try it too. Susie had been married to my son for six years, but I struggled to connect with her. She wore pigtails in her hair and never smiled with teeth. She discussed her reproductive system with a near-pornographic reverence. I did not want to study herbalism. I didn’t want to learn to make wildflower seed-balls or my own callus balm with essential oils. What I wanted from Susie was a lesson on…

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I ALWAYS SAY I LOVE YOU FIRST by Bob Hill

October 9, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

I want to tell you about a day in late August of 2009. It is just past noon, and this is a clear day, a gorgeous day with almost zero headwind. I am sitting on the street-level deck of an Upper East Side coffee shop named M. Rohrs’. M. Rohrs’ is located just off of 86th and 2nd. The traffic is moving briskly throughout this part of town, and that is because the city has settled into a malaise, an annual two-week period that bridges the divide between true summer and the academic fall. This is a quiet time in…

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NAMING CONTESTS by Will Musgrove

October 8, 2024 · Fiction

The cashier, whose name tag reads Barbara, scans my items, a two-liter of Coke and a Milky Way, my usual. It became my usual once I discovered the total, $6.66. Barbara, wearing a faded Looney Tunes T-shirt, won’t say the amount out loud like she does with every other customer. Instead, she stares at me as if I’m summoning a sugar-powered demon. The number never fails to get a reaction, unlike the fact I’m dressed as a cell phone. I pay and grab my stuff off the counter, which is made difficult by the big white gloves velcroed to my…

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CREEP by Julia Meinwald

October 7, 2024 · Fiction

Arriving home from work, Mina noticed a man crawling along her building’s perimeter. He was close to the wall, his bare shoulders almost touching the dirty brick exterior, and wore only a pair of plain white underwear. He had a grim, determined look on his face, which was clean but partially covered by a coarse, unruly beard. He was very thin. The man looked down at the ground as he crawled. Mina watched him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for a number of minutes. Only after he’d crept out of sight did she dash in the…

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SMIONAGAR by Catherine O’Brien

October 3, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

CW deep grief Smionagar (Irish word meaning shattered fragments or pieces). It is an orchard bathing in fog but you would have described it as a swatch of your life receiving its daily powdered kiss. It is a ramshackle house, your former home, but you would have said it’s where you learned that some parasols don’t always give shade to their own suns. It is the anger that you are gone and that the sunrise doesn’t have the decorum to abandon its rays. It is having no jurisdiction over when and where your unpunctual and formidable smile will thaw…

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FIVE OF THE WAYS I WISH I WAS MORE LIKE MOISSANITE by Patrick Eades

October 2, 2024 · Fiction

People often ask me what my spirit animal is. I’m not sure why I am asked so frequently. Maybe they are unsure if I am still human. Or maybe it is the clear spirits mixed with bile I have used to decorate their terrazzo floors that confuses them, and they are not sure whether to use lion strength metho or if bumblebee spray-and-wipe will be enough. In any case, I tell them I don’t have a spirit animal, but if I could choose a spirit mineral, it would be Moissanite. Moissanite is somewhat of an unknown in the spirit world,…

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THREE MICROS by Sarp Sozdinler

October 1, 2024 · Micros

BUTTHOLE PROBLEMS What’s it, what’s it, I can hear you saying, what’s even a butthole problem, or what’s a butthole other than being a problem in itself, of itself, that sounds to me like a butthole problem, butthole, a butthole that rashes like hell after a hot date, that itches like a motherfucker after a night well spent at Taco Bell’s, unlike some other buttholes that smell like proper buttholes, buttholes that smell like years of regret and day-old butter, buttholes that gossip about other buttholes in family functions, about Steve Bannon, about Santa Claus, buttholes that dream of traveling…

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SOME BRIGHT FUTURE by Jason Hardung

September 30, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

Ten years, Dad broke his back for the railroad for ten years and they laid him off, leaving him unemployed with a new mortgage and us two boys to raise on his own. My little brother Jeremy and I became the poorest kids of our middle-class neighborhood. The unnurtured ones, the unsupervised ones, the ones who strayed the streets in the middle of the night. Feral beasts snapping at the moon. The ones sent into the store with a book of food stamps while our father waited in the car. And when we objected, because we had pride too, our…

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FLATLAND by Lana Frankle

September 27, 2024 · Fiction

A female patient of 29 years came to my care for what she described as “a strange break, an awful break” in her leg. After examining by palpitation I was able to verify that the lower portion of her left leg had indeed been severed, just below the knee joint. However, the contour of the juncture of this tear was quite unusual, namely, it was unusually smooth. Even breaks due to puncture by a sharp corner or line tend to leave some level of raggedness and unevenness. Upon noticing this, I asked her permission to make a proper documentation of…

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DAVID KUHNLEIN RECOMMENDS: Seven Books

September 26, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

David Kuhnlein’s books include Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024), Die Closer to Me (Merigold Independent, 2023), Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023), and his movie reviews are collected in the zine Six Six Six. He co-edited the horror anthology Lizard Brain (tragickal, 2024) and his book of stories Ezra’s Head (tragickal) is forthcoming. David is online @princessbl00d and his website is davidkuhnlein.com Mikita Brottman, Thirteen Girls (Nine-Banded Books, 2012) Instead of focusing on the criminal act itself, Thirteen Girls steeps us in its aftermath, in the endless expanse that opens up only after the shock wears off. In an expository…

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