X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

THE INENARRABLE HEAVINESS OF SEEMING by Will Bernardara Jr.

April 5, 2019 · Fiction

“Perception of a state is not the state.” M. John Harrison A teetering bulb of dread and dream referred to – sometimes, by some – as Wes Boolean walks into a hardware store, his/its synapses scintillating with composite images of saw-teeth and conceptions of disjoining girl-parts. (Interjection: The “bulb” of the foregone ‘graph isn’t a floating sci-fi brain. It [the bulb] is impounded in the standard ossein case of a bipedal primate “person” = Wes Boolean. Thing is, the lump of gray mind-goo is the person; i.e., the “person” is a pattern ejaculated out of cerebral media, and so it’s…

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LITTLE SISTER, WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD FROM YOU? by Timothy Boudreau

April 4, 2019 · Fiction

We remember the shy teenager who visited aunts and uncles with a novel and a piece of knitting. The adult in an over-sized sweater, huddled in a corner over a cup of tea. Though separated by ten years we had similar interests and for a time considered ourselves creative people. We always meant to collaborate. What happened? * Especially now I feel you may have insight to offer. Wisdom from a place unknown to the rest of us. Thus enclosed find a few ideas. Feel free to alter them in any way. Merge your memories. Melt your vision over mine…

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GENTLY USED by Olivia Holbrook

April 3, 2019 · Fiction

I sit outside on the hard concrete, feeling the cold seep through the fabric against my thighs, then through my skin, then to my bones. I hold the mug in my hands, they’re shaking. The warmth feels like something distant, warming my palms, making them sweat, while the air numbs my knuckles. And fingers. I see the light in the clouds, reflecting off of something that only my dilated pupils can see. It’s morning. But we’re still here, and I’m still seeing the patterns in the sky that are telling my brain, “you just might not make it to that…

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SHARP PAIN by Andrew Ciaccio

March 31, 2019 · Fiction

You can get by just fine being dull. You can actually do very well for yourself. My husband was an accountant in suburban Oklahoma at an office above an Applebee’s. He made six figures and drank from a coffee mug with Mount Rushmore engraved on it. He did this every day for 20-some years. Then on a snowy Tuesday, standing at the microwave in his windswept khakis, watching his leftover casserole go round-and-round, he lost his edge. Out the window, kids skated on a makeshift ice rink in the strip mall parking lot. The casserole boiled over then exploded as…

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HUSK by James Nulick

March 29, 2019 · Fiction

I like them really young. She’s out there scraping the sidewalk like an old idiot. She’s going to wake them up and that would be bad, the young ones like their sleep. I feed off them during sleep. She’s old and she has old ideas and I honestly don’t know why I keep her on. Maybe because she knows my real age, though she’d never say. If Esmeralda were asked by the press about my age she’d say she was born in when she was born, that’s all. ### My wiki page states I was born in 1968, but we…

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IDROT by Levi Rumata

March 28, 2019 · Fiction

[ WALL LIFE ] In the new curved shapes to come, how we’d imagined the arrival at a monument – something we’d rehearsed many times in anticipation of a disillusionment we’d known then only as some vague, signless desire – it was not as we could have guessed. There weren’t accompanying gestures or sightings of ectoplasm at the old cement factory. It turns out that, for much of our searching, it had been around. Like a landscape pulling apart stretched seethrough thin, so much so we were passing right with it. Screenprinting. On the house that still had its xmas lites…

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RELATIONSHIP MONTAGE by Derek Andersen

March 25, 2019 · Fiction

Just as the conventionally attractive couple locks eyes, igniting a passion that burns with the fury of a thousand supernovas, “I’m a Believer” begins to play. / Cut to a long shot of the conventionally attractive couple skipping through an idyllic meadow, chuckling as they pursue a yellow butterfly. / Cut to the conventionally attractive woman massaging the man’s shoulders as he steps up to a carnival booth. / Cut to the conventionally attractive man ensnaring a bottle and bestowing a massive plush bear upon the woman. / Cut to a crane shot of the conventionally attractive couple breaking out…

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A BIRDWATCHER’S JOURNAL by Alexander Perez

March 24, 2019 · Fiction

Snowy egret overhead. First sighting of spring. A circular flight performed for a mate hidden deep in dead river reeds. He drops out of sight. Nothing except gray sky. (My script walks across the page like sandpiper prints in wet sand.) A fisherman floats by in his canoe, through the thin ice floes. (Floating mosaic of ice, geometry of winter’s disrepair.) He’s spectacled, black bearded. Mid-thirties? Despite the cool morning, he takes off his blue flannel overshirt. Strong arms. He casts a shining lure. A northern pike! The fisherman holds it up. I wave. We see a female mallard appear…

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CHANCES by Conor McNamara

March 22, 2019 · Fiction

I’ve been exchanging letters with an inmate at Downstate Correctional Facility, the friend of a friend. In my letters I talk about my work, the woods and the hours. Even though I scoff at Lena’s “attracting happiness” theories, I encourage my friend’s friend to “keep his head up” and I assure him that he is loved. I decided that when I got laid off, I would drive to Fishkill, New York and visit him. Leaving my cellphone and wallet in a drab locker room that smells like puke, I cross the metal detector. And then I’m in the visitors’ center…

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TIME PASSES FASTER AT SEA by Graham Irvin

March 21, 2019 · Fiction

In Korea everyone called my grandfather Pete because they didn’t know he was going to be a grandfather some day. When my parents got married Pete punched me in the face. He wanted me to grow up tough. My mom won’t forget the stories Pete told her about working radar in the belly of a battleship, seeing big green blips of terror appear and disappear. He told her they were bigger than the ship, by two or three times. My mom says, ‘What could that have been?’ When there was a big green blip approaching on the radar Pete thought,…

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