x-r-a-y magazine, Author at X-R-A-Y

OUTING by Serkan Görkemli

March 4, 2022 · Fiction

By the time I show up for our weekly outing on Thursday evening, my friend Yaprak has already ordered the first bottle of red wine. We’re meeting on the patio of Büyük Truva Oteli, one of the oldest and most expensive hotels on the shore of the Dardanelles in downtown Çanakkale in northwestern Turkey. She beckons me with her left hand to our quiet corner. Her right hand puts out one of the many cigarettes she has already smoked. The night is young, and I’ve brought two packs of Camels just in case. I’m a little late, and I already…

x-r-a-y magazine

AFTER NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE FOR THREE DAYS by Quinn Forlini

March 2, 2022 · Fiction

Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery. She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more. Her mother reminds her for the seventh time that it’s a bit chilly out, so at the last second, Anna grabs her dad’s black…

x-r-a-y magazine

FIGHT VIDEOS 1-3 by Julian Castronovo

February 28, 2022 · Fiction

I. The babysitter Bunny put me in the basement and locked the door. It was an old basement, a cellar. There was a torn up floral sofa and a boiler and a window that looked out at the bottom of a hole. The hole was maybe four feet deep and was lined with pieces of wood that kept it from collapsing into itself. I walked over and looked up through it. The sky was dark yellow. I went and sat on the sofa and watched videos of fat people slapping each other hard in the face. Then I heard…

x-r-a-y magazine

CAN’T DIE IN PORTLAND, MAINE by Scott Laudati

February 25, 2022 · Fiction

It was summer everywhere but Portland, Maine. From Brooklyn to Portsmouth road crews sat along I-95 and stared longingly into the finality of their existence. This was it. The winters too cold and the summers too hot. Fall was spoken about with the nostalgia of an old folk song, and spring, of course, ran shorter than a rainy weekend. The crews spent the entirety of these uncomfortable months working on the sides of roads while everyone sped by on their way to somewhere better, or worse. The only time the two groups interacted was when a motorist fell asleep and…

x-r-a-y magazine

DUCK POND by Adam Soldofsky

February 24, 2022 · Comics

x-r-a-y magazine

BUNNY: A TRIPTYCH by Yasmina Din Madden

February 23, 2022 · Fiction

1. The rabbits come in dozens it seems. Nothing one minute, invasion the next. They crouch in the grass like tiny statues, gray fur flecked with white. Cottontails. Leaf-ears at attention. Waiting. Kits, short for kittens, now called bunnies, as if kitten is not cute enough for the tiniest of these rabbits. Bunny, diminutive of the Scottish bun, a nickname for a pet rabbit. Also, slang for a young, attractive woman. She’s a real bunny. A male rabbit is a buck, a female a doe. Before mating, the buck chases the doe until she turns and boxes at him with…

x-r-a-y magazine

DEREK MAINE on film with Rebecca Gransden

February 22, 2022 · Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you? The first film I saw in the theater was Flight of the Navigator. We must have arrived late. Or it was unexpectedly full. We had to sit in the very front row. I was very uncomfortable. I was seven or eight. It came out in 1986 so I would have been four but that can’t be true. Anyway, when you are four or seven or eight you are really small. I remember the screen was huge. I couldn’t handle the sensory overload. It felt like the screen was going…

x-r-a-y magazine

EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF MY CAPACITY by Barbara Lock

February 21, 2022 · Fiction

One time I punched a wall that I thought was made of plasterboard but was in fact concrete. Either way, I would have broken my hand. The side of my fist near my pinky crunched up and my girlfriend told me I was a lunatic. Stop it, stop it, she said. Then she covered her face with a shroud, which irritated me to no end. I wore a white wool sweater in the style of Irish fishermen last year which placed me fifteen years too far in the past, or possibly the future. It’s hard to know. My appearance was…

x-r-a-y magazine

STICK FIGURES by Sara Solberg

February 18, 2022 · Creative Nonfiction

In an eastern New Mexico desert, amid a forest of mesquite and bluestem grass, overlooking nothing but miles upon miles of iron-pressed, sunbaked earth, sits the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP for short). On the surface, it looks like any other government base: a simple grid of unremarkable squat buildings, the tan color of which bleeds into the surrounding arid landscape. But step into one of the elevators that spend their days bobbing up and down WIPP’s vertical mine shafts, ferrying hard-hatted workers between ground level and the ancient salt bed 2,150 feet below, and it’s a different story. One…

x-r-a-y magazine

PORTRAIT OF A FLORIST IN THE DESERT IN PARTS by Dylan Smith

February 16, 2022 · Fiction

1 My van broke down on a mountain north of Marfa, so I had it towed back to Santa Fe where a mechanic named Ever repairs transmissions. I talk to Ever every day. Every time Ever answers I have to explain to him it’s me—the kid with the tagged-up van. My sister lives with an unemployed florist in this complex in the desert. The florist offered to pick me up from Ever’s; to drive me ever deeper into this desert to visit with my sister. What a guy. In my portrait of the florist, he will be sitting at my…

x-r-a-y magazine

« Previous 1…73 747576 77…174 Next »