Fiction

TOGETHER WE GROW by Katie Oliver

March 18, 2021

My boyfriend is a plant enthusiast: the more exotic the better. Old man’s beard, elk horn, fishbone. The bedroom is particularly full of them. They hang from curtain poles, draping down like Rapunzel’s hair. Distressingly phallic cacti loiter in corners; succulents take up space where they shouldn’t. Cacti are a type of succulent, he tells me. Whatever, I reply. You’re succulent, he says, and bites my neck. I roll my eyes. I go along with it, because it’s easier. When I get back from work, more seem to have appeared. Did you buy more plants? No, he says, flipping through

THE FOUR SEASONS by Trent England

March 17, 2021

She was sixty-nine, he was seventy. In the kitchen she baked two halves of an apple sprinkled with cinnamon. He drank iced coffee and did his Sean Connery impression. She pulled down a shoebox from a shelf in the closet and read her old journals. He took photos of their Pontiac and tapped on his phone and in a few minutes it was officially for sale, online, a part of their history up for grabs. She got a root canal that cost more than three mortgage payments, back when they had a mortgage. He bought a new phone that cost

HOW I LEARNT TO DRIVE by Roseline Mgbodichinma

March 15, 2021

Sometimes brown girls can wear black. Not the colour, but a mood, a presence, a halo. I hold my aunt’s hand as she struggles with the chain. I want to tell her there’s no use, it can’t cage her spirit, but I stop myself. The Ward smells of grudges and longing. What is madness, if not a pile of lost love and mercy? There is something about blue that’s retrograde. It’s the colour of sky fading into evening, the colour of hospital bedsheets the severe cases lie on. Scratch on the walls suggest a previous occupant might have had claws.

THE HEAT by Connor Thompson

March 12, 2021

Because of the heat, she decides to sleep downstairs. “This old townhouse funnels the stuff upwards like acid reflux,” she says. She slips from the sheets, props the standing fan under her arm. It’s fine by him; he relishes in spreading out on the bed without her. (Starfishing, she calls it.) He listens to her footsteps recede on the stairs and unfurls his limbs to the four corners of the mattress. Above him the ceiling fan carves circles in the air, striving to please. Two days ago an ambulance came down their street at an un-ambulance-y pace and pulled its

HOME SOON FOR A HOME COOKED MEAL by Paul Rousseau

March 11, 2021

Dad is not here, but he should be, soon, from work. He doesn’t drink and he’s not having an affair. He is a big man, I know. He likes red meat and horseradish. My sister’s boyfriend works, too, at the train depot, but him and my sister are both upstairs already. Mom puts butter rolls in the oven at 425 degrees. Lying on my back in the family room, I have my feet on the grille of our gas fireplace. I test myself to see how long I can rest my feet on the glass part where it’s hot. I’ve

SELF-MAINTENANCE by John Chrostek

March 10, 2021

I live at the bottom of an old apartment tower and my tub won’t stop filling up with water. The building, weary from a century of American life, funnels its sewage down through my unit’s pipes until it all gets stuck up tight and rises with a fury, bubbling and nasty from the drain. For days, my every waking moment has been spent dumping bucket after bucket of the hot, dim water down the toilet and calling out for help. The calling out is pointless, of course, for what raw marrow remains of my voice gets trapped in my apartment,

A LOST AND WORDLESS FEELING by Becca Yenser

March 8, 2021

for Abby Vasquez All of our friends are dying but they are the ones to blame, so we shut up about it and sit outside at their old favorite bars, drinking set-ups until we puke. The bars are named after animals or phrases: Red Fox, Crow Bar, Haymaker, Lost and Found. Our friends shot themselves in one-room apartments, jumped from bridges, hung themselves from garage ropes. They had dark hair, shiny hair, green eyes, red beards, brown eyes, dimples, scars, cellulite. They stooped when they walked, or danced on bikes, or wore layered sweatshirts instead of coats. They played

DUCK, DUCK, OWL by Michelle Ross

March 5, 2021

The ducks are a pair—Mallards from the pond in the nearby park. Every evening, they claim the shallow end of the swimming pool, float in languid circles. They’re not threatened by the woman watching them from the canvas chair. They don’t even startle when she goes inside the house to pour more prosecco. The woman is a divorcée—she’s lived alone in this house twelve years. Her grown daughters transplanted thousands of miles away. Boyfriends have spent the night from time to time, but there’s no boyfriend now. The woman notes the elegant (pompous?) curve of the ducks’ breasts and necks.

AND WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT by Francine Witte

March 4, 2021

First time I met my brother, he was a hum in my mother’s swelling belly. *** When he was 10 and me 14, we’d mock our parents’ arguments. We’d sneak up to the attic. He’d put on Dad’s soggy fedora and kick my bottom hard. When I flinched, he’d say, “hey, that’s how Dad does it.” *** I remember the first dead rabbit. It was the winter it wouldn’t stop raining. Always on the edge of snow, but not. My father scowled at my brother, who was something like 11. “What’d you go and do that for?” He shook the

THAT GIRL by Sarah Freligh

March 1, 2021

we used to laugh at, the girl who walked the hallways head-down, cold-shouldered by lockers, who blistered her fingers twisting Kleenex into flowers for homecoming floats the cool girls would ride on, yeah, that girl was nobody we knew until she went missing and then we remembered how in first grade she peed a puddle that spread and smelled of cheese and fish and scattered the class until the janitor showed up with a broom and a pail of red dust, remembered the Show and Tell in fifth grade when she shared the broken glass she’d found on the street