X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

THE CELEBRATION by Zac Smith

July 14, 2021 · Fiction

Usually, when my week was shitty, I liked to order Thai food… I was the only one in the family who liked Thai food, which meant I didn’t get to order it much… But since I was getting divorced and living alone in a shitty apartment, I got to order it as much as I wanted… I was getting into it in a big way, basically… Since most weeks were shitty, I ordered Thai food most weekends… And I never got sick of it… Thai food is varied and complex… It can be very exciting, but also comforting… A perfect…

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AIR QUALITY INDEX by Mike Nagel

July 12, 2021 · Fiction

Sunday morning my phone warns me that the air quality in Carrollton is low. I step outside and take a few deep breaths. I can see what my phone means. Not great. Most things leave something to be desired. Let me put it this way. There seems to be some room for improvement. Recently J showed me a graph and the line was going straight down. “Well,” I say. “I can’t say I’m surprised.” “Actually,” she says. “In this case, down is a good thing.” Lately I’ve been drinking this low ABV cider from the Stella Artois beer company….

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OPEN MOUTHED by Kwan Ann Tan

July 9, 2021 · Fiction

I knew I was in trouble the moment my co-worker caught me humming the female part to the last duet in La Boheme. ‘That sounds familiar,’ Lucy said as we stacked rows and rows of fragrant soap. ‘My grandmother loves that opera. She’s never seen it in person though, which is a shame. Maybe I should bring her one of these days.’ We laughed and continued restocking the shelves. It was a job that made a pair of opera tickets near impossible. The sound system crackled to life, and my faint memories of the song were drowned out by saccharine…

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THE WASP by Tyler Engström

July 8, 2021 · Fiction

I look out the kitchen window and wonder why the flowers won’t grow. I can’t even remember what I planted, what sort of beauty I’m disappointed in not receiving. I’ve given them plenty of water. Was it too much water? I don’t know. I’ve never known. What life does water make, anyway? Anyway, a wasp comes up to the window and lands on what would be my nose, if not for the window. I lovingly watch his little hands scrape against each other. Adorable! “You look like a fly,” I tell him, “like all the little flies that crowd every…

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BIG DINKY ENERGY by Josh Sherman

July 5, 2021 · Fiction

You really need to figure out how to stop drinking so much. You could ask your doctor to refer a therapist or join some 12-step program. But you’ve got a better idea. It’ll just have to wait until the weekend, when you aren’t busy writing marketing copy for real-estate developers. *** ‘The Mulberry Estates are a charming collection of spacious single-family homes in leafy Elgin County.’ ‘Set to rise in Toronto’s vibrant Entertainment District, the Foxtrot is a luxurious 45-storey condo tower by the award-winning Mango Development Corporation.’ These are the sentences you’re paid to write eight hours a day,…

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SERPENT WITH FIREWORK by Harris Lahti

July 4, 2021 · Fiction

The sunburnt man climbs the steep bank of the lake, dragging a large plastic cooler packed with the last beers of his life. And then? Redemption. Stone-cold sobriety. Through his speed shades, the remains of the abandoned luxury resort rise in nuclear yellow—the shattered windows and graffitied cabins, the crooked doors and cracked tennis courts, the moist volleyball sand where he first slid against his wife and jizzed his teenaged blue jeans. Boy, it sure is nice to discover everything where he left it. Or not exactly. From the shallow end of the pool, three skateboarders stare up at him—at…

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LOW GAS AND A LION IN THE BACKSEAT by Hannah Gregory

July 1, 2021 · Fiction

My hand lives in her belly. That belly has a tumor the size of a banjo. I like to think my hand keeps her company, playing a soothing song on her tumor banjo whenever she cries in pain. I use my one hand to play my non-tumor banjo for her, my actual banjo, like hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee-hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee. No chords because, hello, one hand over here. My girlfriend Tracy is always yelling at me for getting a lion, but Theory: Is it really about the banjo? Tracy refuses to help me with the chords so she just hears me singing in Open G…

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GREGOR MENDEL NEVER KNEW MY FATHER by Kristin Tenor

June 28, 2021 · Fiction

Mr. Chavez stands in front of the classroom and talks about peas. Green peas, yellow peas, wrinkled peas, smooth-as-Mr. Chavez’s-bald head peas. He says when two different varieties are sown together under a blanket of dark, loamy soil, they sometimes yield plants with pods containing green and wrinkled peas or yellow and smooth or maybe they’ll come out the same shade of chartreuse as the faded bridesmaid’s dress hidden in the back of your mother’s closet, the one she wore the night she met your father and got drunk on wild dandelion wine for the first time and conceived you,…

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THE FUCK’S A TUFFET? by Jonathan Cardew

June 25, 2021 · Fiction

Little Miss Muffet took another hit from her Juul. It was Friday, which meant English class all afternoon. Instead of walking towards the Arts building, though, Muffet detoured into the woods so she could do a little pipe before Hawthorne. When she sat down on a grassy embankment, a spider descended from a nearby tree–a ten-foot wide spider, big enough to hop and skip over a bus. She tried to light her pipe, but the spider freaked out and hissed at the flame. “Oh, just piss off,” she said to the spider, and it promptly did. …

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THREE MICROS by Evan Jerome Williams

June 24, 2021 · Fiction

Carl Carl is a cobra with nine eyes. Carl has seven too many eyes, and none of them see well. He has difficulty finding eyeglasses that work for him on account of his extra eyes. Carl needs eyeglasses to read. He is a scholar studying applied reptilian physics, a discipline primarily concerned with asteroid-detection and trajectory-disruption techniques. Carl needs eyeglasses so he can protect us. Carl found an eye doctor who used to be a pirate. The eye doctor poked out seven of Carl’s eyes with precise stabbing motions, then made as many eyepatches with equal precision. Carl looks like…

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