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MY MOTHER TOLD ME YOU COULD ONLY KNOW THAT ORANGES WERE GOOD IF THEY SMELLED LIKE FLORIDA by Megan M. Garwood

April 19, 2021 · Fiction

At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. I am scared but also complimented. I am in the cereal aisle now, and I think…

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SINK by Elane Kim

April 16, 2021 · Fiction

When my brother was young, I fed him fruit that fell from the trees in our backyard. What I fed him wasn’t really fruit, but the buds of what would be sweet in the spring, and the not-fruit didn’t really fall from trees in our backyard, because there was no backyard. Back then, we lived in an apartment complex with studded walls and a pool that yawned and stretched past the pale sun. The children all thought the pool was haunted, including me, because somebody’s son drowned in it in the 60s or the 80s or some other era we…

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WHEN WILL MY RAPIST’S CLOSET BE CLEANED? by Meg Tuite

April 15, 2021 · Fiction

“Hysteria comes from the Greek root hystera, meaning ‘uterus’. Originally, it was believed that hysteria and hysterical symptoms were caused by a defect in the womb, and thus, only women could become hysterical.” –Shalome Sine Vivid and startled, blood spits out a song, a sigh, signals a stale rustle of corruption. A pulse rouses itself from the uterus. And those subterranean tubes palpate the last fumes of incessant weather before swirling the rays of dusk down the toilet. I am a girl of fugitive parts. Cut with a straight knife. Glue fists the slit where loot, diced and unkempt, is…

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DENOUEMENT by S.S. Mandani

April 14, 2021 · Fiction

“Sure, I’ve eaten cookies well into adulthood. Some days all I eat is one cookie. I break little bite-sized pieces off and revel in the ‘gasm that is sugar, butter, salt, flour, chocolate, pecans, jam, or what have you. I eat chocolate chip cookies, of course, but lace cookies are my current obsession. My taste buds ride a buttery, crispy wave, cresting into a smile. I have disliked certain cookies. Usually, though, I get over myself, and find a redeeming quality. Growing up, I hated those jam cookies served with chai. You know the ones? But one day the light…

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“IT” by Michael Seymour Blake

April 13, 2021 · Comics, Michael Seymour Blake, Wildly Inconsistent Comics

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A REVIEW OF JOSHUA DALTON’S I HATE YOU, PLEASE READ ME by Selena Cotte

April 13, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

Joshua Dalton’s debut collection I Hate You, Please Read Me (House of Vlad Press, Feb 2021) can also be read as a novel in fragments: It uses tweets, direct messages, flash-length stories, and a much-anticipated closing screenplay to communicate a pitiful, media-saturated existence. While never explicit, it seems clear that the stories and interactions all exist in dare-we-say anti-hero Marshall Crawford’s world in varying degrees of intimacy, to paint a character portrait of self-pity, self-awareness, and self-abuse. Even stories about other characters appear as representations of his own self-image, merely presented from an angle, using TV tropes and dripping with…

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THE MARRIAGE TEST by Bailey Bujnosek

April 12, 2021 · Fiction

In a long-forgotten society, there was a test people had to pass to get married. The test had one question. The question was multiple choice. If you were a woman, the question was: You have one plank of wood. Do you: Affix it to the wall to support your husband’s golf trophies? Burn it to provide warmth for you and your family? Ask your husband what he wants to do with the wood? You know from other records that the question and answer choices were different for men. You also know that there was a correct answer that, if circled,…

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VALUATION by Kayleigh Shoen

April 9, 2021 · Fiction

My mom used to say if you don’t own anything worth stealing, you never need to lock your doors. In our neighborhood, the breeze at night could travel the entire length of the street in and out through the screen doors of unlocked houses. It was that kind of place. There were three thefts that summer before the police would even file a report. They kept saying it was probably a misunderstanding; what thief leaves cash to cover the object they stole? And if anything, the amount left was probably too much: $50 for the Zeiglers’ oinking cookie jar, $25…

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BUSINESSMAN by Jim Windolf

April 8, 2021 · Fiction

My father told me, when I was fourteen, that business was a language anyone could learn. I never got fluent. So there I stood, a thirty-six-year-old man with not much in the bank, at the side of a hole in the ground as they lowered the coffin that contained his body. He had run a small empire in our New Jersey town. His main business was an insurance agency. There was also a travel bureau, a movie theater, and a restaurant. Of all his businesses, I probably liked the travel bureau best. He took me there now and then on…

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THAT WAS THE YEAR WE by Eric Scot Tryon

April 7, 2021 · Fiction

That was the year we went to Colombia to visit her parents. Her mom had just had surgery on her hand and couldn’t cook, so we spent a month eating empanadas from the little market on the corner, the one with the blind dog that always lay across the open door. Perfect golden-brown crescents, we devoured them on the small white plastic table outside with a cold beer or we ate them as we walked around the town square. She would tell me the history of the church or about the protests that happened there when she was a kid….

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