admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3, Author at X-R-A-Y

DAWNS by Bright Aboagye

August 14, 2025 · Fiction

On some days, you’re a ghost to your own body. Some mornings, your bones feel borrowed. Never been yours. Just something you’re renting till it all breaks down. You lie still and feel every joint light up like someone lit a match inside your marrow. *** It’s 4:27 am and you’re staring at your laptop, trying to write a suicide note that sounds less dramatic than it is. All you’ve got so far is, I am tired. Three words. Nothing more. You backspace it and watch the cursor blink like it’s judging you. It’s the only thing in this room…

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FORREST GUMP 3 by Julián Martinez

August 13, 2025 · Micros

There was a billboard along the highway that read, FG3: ONE LAST RUN, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright profile to profile, stars and stripes behind them. The bottom text dictated: WATCH NOW ON AMERICAPLUS, so I opened my week’s ration of AmericaPlus and swallowed the last tab of blotter paper. It wasn’t enough to hallucinate, but my microdose made rush hour on the highway seem warm and tingly with sunset and my fellow commuters as carefree and wealthy as I briefly was.

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RENTAL LEASE APPLICATION by Anna Koltes

August 12, 2025 · Fiction

Name: You almost write his surname in place of your own, a knee jerk response. You slap the mosquito that has landed on the back of your neck to feed. Upon assuming his name, you forgot your own. You grapple with the correct spelling. The vowels squish uncertainly inside your head, the consonants bumping awkwardly like soup dumplings. But this should be the least of your concerns. After so long together, your name isn’t the only possession you’ve left behind. Reason for moving: You can make something up here. It will be simpler. A barbecue fire that got out…

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LUKE by Sam Berman

August 11, 2025 · Fiction

He was known as the best guitar player in the United States. Maybe the world. I didn’t know; I’d never met him. Luke. I had friends who knew him, had seen him play in the French Quarter, or they themselves had jammed with him in one of those hill houses in San Francisco when he was part-timing as a tour guide in Ghirardelli Square. They attested to his skill. His virtuosity. The word “singularity” was used. “Heaven sent,” got thrown around. I was told outside a restaurant that there was a girl in Morocco who was “nearly his equal.” Close…

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OTTERS AND TIGERS by John Jodzio

August 7, 2025 · Fiction

I work part-time at a dry cleaners, but I’m mostly known for posting cute videos of otters that make people smile. Most people thank me for my work by liking and sharing my videos but some people, like two or three a month, ask me to post videos of otters having sex. When I tell them I don’t post lewd otter content, these people usually say mean things about my penis. For instance, how it’s microscopic. Or how it’s bent like a Russian sickle. Or how it smells like pot roast. If I could brush these comments off I would,…

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JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

August 6, 2025 · Fiction

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on. Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of…

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CHRISTOPHER ZEISCHEGG’S ‘THE MAGICIAN’ reviewed by Chloe Pingeon

August 5, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root…

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BIG STEVE HID WATER BOTTLES OF PISS BENEATH HIS BED by Matti Ben-Lev

August 4, 2025 · Creative Nonfiction

He was used to being homeless. He was used to sleeping in his car in Philly parking lots. Once, he picked up a Tinder date, drove her 3 hours from Baltimore to Philly, rode around looking for his ex-girlfriend, didn’t find her, and only told his date the truth about his ex and why they drove to Philly on the car ride back. I don’t remember how she responded, but I think they went out a few more times. Big Steve unrolled cigarettes, made a bong out of a water bottle and a pen, hit tobacco out the window of…

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CAUSE AND EFFECT by Claire Hanlon

July 31, 2025 · Micros

When the birds burst up and out from the sidewalk grass in front of my car as I’m driving home from the store on Mother’s Day, and I think: how beautiful! as the unexpected blue of their wings flash before me, and then: oh no! did I hit them?—it’s a near thing, a miracle: I miss them, just. Because the birds live, when I arrive home and honk to let my family know I’m back, let’s go, and my husband emerges, he does not stare perplexedly at the bumper of our newly-purchased SUV. And, because the birds are both still…

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PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

July 30, 2025 · Fiction

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case. *** The Australian’s username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn’t know that yet. I was eleven and three-quarters. I’d found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to “Why Georgia” in Literature class, during our poetry unit. “am I living it right?” over and over again, while his hands shook. I…

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