DEALBREAKERS by Rachel Dorn

Would you date a dying girl I type in the message box. My thumb hovers over the send button. I hit delete. What are ur dealbreakers I type instead. **************** We don’t say terminal anymore, Janessa, my support group leader, says on one of our monthly Zoom calls. We say incurable. Because, you know, people can live a long time with this now. What doesn’t need to be said is that not all of us will. **************** In the months after I find out I have an incurable heart and lung disease, I spend a lot of time thinking about…

Continue Reading...

WHAT THE BODY WOULD NOT HOLD by Liana Meffert

(Spring) We have to count several times to get the numbers right. There are so many. Superior right buttock, inferior left buttock, and flank, right temple, right chest, left lower leg, and thigh. And when the counts agree, we sit down to call his mother, who doesn’t answer, but calls back several minutes later. Whether she believes us or not is beside the point; she hangs up. I hate this. Wouldn’t you? We call the medical examiner and the organ donation center, who will in turn call her, and then she will begin to believe, or won’t. There isn’t a…

Continue Reading...

OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES by Brittany Thomas

We drove to Dorset to be alone, not to hunt fossils.   We drove south to sit in silence, to read books by bayed windows, to feed a tiny wood stove pieces of the year. We let ourselves be washed by the shoreline, our sore city spirits cleansed like frail Victorians suffering hysteria. What more can anyone ask of an English October?  Here the Fossil Wardens beg your help: please take what you find. You see, our fossils make their way out of 66 million years of mud and clay to the Jurassic Coast only to fall on the beach and…

Continue Reading...

FARM HANDS by Mark Abdon

The rocking horse was hideous, though. It was the eyes. Wide open and vacant, set too high on that giant head. The foot-pegs had snapped off on Black Friday.

Continue Reading...

SWEETNESS by Tina Kimbrell

On the morning that she died, I don’t think I knew that it was the day that we would stop waiting. We were just going to her bedside, as we did. As we had done for days. Suspended in that grief fog, gritty and spinning. 

Continue Reading...