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

HOW TO TELL A SCARY STORY by Sara Hills

April 5, 2021 · Fiction

Start with setting Think about someplace you know. A lonely walk to school, the back alleyways downtown, the dark crevices under the high school bleachers, a house from your childhood. Remember the sodium-yellow haze over the empty parking lot that time in college when a rugby player refused to get out of your car, and decide, instead, to catch the reader off-guard. Think about places that should be more comforting and familiar—a clean ribbon of asphalt under a cloudless sky, the upstairs bathroom at a family Christmas party, a sleepover at your best friend’s house, a city bus. Add in…

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ELMO GLICK by Matt Mitchell

April 2, 2021 · Fiction

It was 1966, late winter, when a mild western breeze combed across the Pacific Coast. Elmo Glick, in a velvet tracksuit colored beige, sagged himself over the railing of his second-floor balcony. He wasn’t going to kill himself, no. He was more interested in testing whether or not he could accurately spit a clump of saliva into his treble-clef-shaped in-ground pool from there. The blob of grey cannonballing out of Glick’s mouth and then buoying in the clear-blue water and then thinly dissolving into strings of bubbly DNA. I haven’t had a real hit since 1962, Glick thought to himself….

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UNDERTOW by Tara Stillions Whitehead

April 1, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

We pinned their name tags to our knitted sacks. Reynolds. Solomon. Childs. Kennedy. We wrote their room numbers on our wrists and waited for them on the cement benches near the commandant’s office. We sat with our legs crossed, condoms in our back pockets, while they marched the line in their parade uniforms. We tracked sand from dorm to bedroom sheets. Someone’s mother washed their civvies and kept them in the guest room or the pool house, convinced we were the ones doing the civilizing. There were boys whose names we couldn’t share. Boys whose names we’d seen taped inside…

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TWO MICROS by Caleb Lyons

March 29, 2021 · Fiction

It Was Clouds On my way to his house in Malibu, a song about life and death in Los Angeles played on the radio. At the house, the artist carefully signed his work and handed it to me. I wrapped it in glassine and told him his show in New York looked good in the pictures. He gave me a bag to gather avocados from his trees. We talked about how great Chicago is and why we left. 3 years later, when the artist died, I went back to the house in Malibu to pick up his final piece….

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“Sleepless in Queens, NY” by Michael Seymour Blake

March 29, 2021 · Comics, Michael Seymour Blake, Wildly Inconsistent Comics

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LIVER MUSH IS AN ESSAY ABOUT MY MOM by Graham Irvin

March 3, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

I want to talk about liver mush. Liver mush is a breakfast meat from Western North Carolina made of boiled pork parts and corn meal. It’s my favorite breakfast meat. It’s my favorite word. Liver mush is more than pork parts and corn meal, though. There is also sage and black pepper. But, liver mush is more than breakfast and sustenance too. It’s something close to that, but not exactly. It’s home but not home, but not exactly. Liver mush is more than a piece of fried pork parts and corn meal. Liver mush is more than old white dinner…

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BIRDS AREN’T REAL by D.T. ROBBINS

February 24, 2021 · Fiction

My girlfriend tells me something’s off in our relationship. Says we’re missing a spark or magic or whatever she calls it. I go, Oh, you wanna see magic? She goes, Yeah, idiot, I just said that. So, I wrap an old t-shirt around her eyes and lead her out into the field behind our apartment. It’s all a big surprise. The ice chest is full of beers and pastrami sandwiches and the chocolate cookies she baked last month. I put a slice of bread in a Ziplock bag with the cookies to keep them fresh. The cookies stay moist and…

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WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW by Jamy Bond

February 22, 2021 · Fiction

That your mother is dying alone in a room at St. Francis. The stale sighs of a ventilator echo through the hallways, pumping one last moment of life into her over and over and over. There’s a sad sliver of hope in the sound of it, and in the silence that follows. She forgives the insolence, the years you spent overseas and never called, the sporadic letters full of vacancy, even your cold indifference to her cancer diagnosis. She has mostly forgotten your teenage shenanigans: the time you snuck bourbon into your lunch box and drank it at school, nights…

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THE PURPLE TREE by Alienor Bombarde

February 21, 2021 · Fiction

It was not her favorite tree. It was simply where the children met. The tree was tall, its purple leaves like curtains, shielding its trunk. It was where, when she was four years old, she first saw Pasang. Pasang was the first and only newcomer the children ever knew. His father had come to work on construction plans. Pasang had a round face and a soft pink mouth. Even before she knew that people could use mouths for anything other than eating and drinking, she liked the look of it, its softness and slight downward turn. Those were the days,…

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THE BLUE ANGEL by Austin Farber

February 19, 2021 · Fiction

She was cooking dinner when I walked in the door. She had worked all night at the hospital, slept the whole day while I was at work, and was about to leave for another shift after dinner. I usually was relieved when she left, but tonight she looked unusually chipper. When she greeted me, she was dicing up a full rotisserie chicken. She kissed me. “How was your day, honey?” She asked. “Good,” I said. “How was your night?” “Oh, it was something,” she said, stripping the meat. “We had a code blue in ICU. A real stiff.” “Oh wow,”…

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