X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

THE HORSES, THE HORSES by John Torrance (Megan Pillow)

October 30, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

All in all, it’s a good place to stop for the night. There’s little work to be done and a beauty of a view: a tranquil lake at the bottom of a grassy hill, lush and electric green beneath the early evening sun. No other cattle to crowd them. After they put up tents, perhaps a bit of play to shake off the day’s ride: a tune on Morton’s banjo. Then grass for the cattle and grub for the men: canned beans, or maybe a rabbit that’s a touch too slow, something that makes the belly full without turning it….

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THIS SKIN YOU CALL YOUR OWN by Chloe N. Clark

October 29, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

He told me he didn’t believe in witches. We were on the floor of my apartment, half undressed while he used one hand to unbutton my jeans, when he said it. Out of nowhere. “I don’t believe in witches, you know,” he said. He began kissing down my neck, hand slipping beneath my jeans. “What do you mean?” I asked. My own hand slid down his stomach. He let out a short exhale of air. “Like everyone told me you were a witch before we hooked up,” he said. I could hear the excitement behind his words, the thought of…

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A SPECTRE LURKS AT THE PUTT-PUTT ON RIVERSIDE by Keef

October 29, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

The ghost in our town haunts the putt-putt golf course with the big Peter Pan statue out front. The haunting is the only semi-interesting thing about the course, and even the ghost is dull. Kyle from AP Biology works the concessions, wearing a paper hat and staring at his phone. Hot dogs are only a dollar, but you get what you pay for. All the holes are pretty busted, and there’s always a parade of sad single dads tromping around the place with their kids, trying to make up for neglect and inattention and assumptions that they’d always have what…

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THE ROSE by Joshua Hebburn

October 28, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

Driving back after the funeral, he stopped at a Target to get Starbucks and take a piss. He’d stayed overnight at a motel, and he left the motel early in the morning to make it back east by driving all day. Driving that morning he thought of the black and white picture of a Joshua tree in the room. It was the only thing not reusable in the motel; it was the sort of picture somebody would take in an intermediate photography class, not something tastelessly good the owners would get in a bulk purchase of decor. There was something…

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I PROMISE I WON’T SCREAM by Jan Stinchcomb

October 28, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

They say you did it. Please tell us how it went down, otherwise we will never be able to stop parking in front of your house on Hibiscus Way. The woman who lives there now glares at us from the driveway. She got the place for a good price because of what happened, but by then most of us were gone, sent away in our parents’ last attempt to save us from the bad scene. We have returned, as all children do, because we have nowhere else to go. The sunlight in our hometown knocks us out. It follows us…

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THE BABY by Jamy Bond

October 28, 2019 · Fiction

One morning, she told me the story of how her friend’s baby died in a car accident. “They were stopped at a red light. Someone came up from behind and slammed into them. My friend thought immediately of her baby in the back seat, but when she turned around to reach for it, she saw the baby’s head pop off, its arms and legs break, its chest cave in.” All I could think about at school that day was the baby. Its head popping off. We were supposed to practice writing our letters, but every time I came to the…

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(IT’S NOT LIKE CLAIRE DIDN’T BRING IT ON HERSELF) by Jennifer Fliss

October 27, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

The indigo sky informed all of them that it would soon be time. That the children as clowns and superheroes and princesses would be stuffed full of Reese’s and candy corn and rolling in their little beds positively asphyxiated with the sugar. The teenagers were dressed in threadbare tie dye t-shirts, fringed leather vests. Claire wore bellbottoms and a crop top. She had been about to pull on a long-sleeved shirt. (Ben said don’t.) Doris’s house was not what you’d expect. A rambler, off-white brick and something that was not brick but just as ugly. The numbers, 10220, hung off…

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CATOPTROMANCY by A.V. Greene

October 27, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

In the instant before Molly turns the light back on, your friends all forget how deep puberty’s teeth have sunk.

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TUESDAY AT THE MONASTERY by Amy Barnes

October 27, 2019 · Fiction

We reverently chop up Brother Francisco. Deo Optimo Maximo. After morning prayers, that’s we do on Tuesday. Laid on the dining room table, our former dining partners resemble dinner chickens we used to eat together, reduced to skeletal bones. We carefully cut away flesh and organs and eyeballs and hair. Stripped of their robes, we leave only skulls covered in skin, brains removed as if we are Egyptian mummy makers, not religious brothers. I measure a place for my living hands on the arched crypt walls, bits of his skin clinging like gloves. Laid flat. Stretched out. A hand is…

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GLASS by K.B. Carle

October 26, 2019 · Boneyard, Fiction

I don’t remember the before. I’m not really sure I want to. If I went searching for a lost past somewhere in the recesses of a brain that dissolved when I died, would it really belong to me once found? I’m no longer the person I was. In fact, I’m not even a person anymore. Back then, I assume, I had skin, a tongue, a nose. A voice a family might recognize, if I had a family. Fingernails I could paint, or chew when nervous. Eat or spit out of the side of my mouth. People can be gross or…

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