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ASSIGNATION by Joshua Hebburn

April 29, 2020

He bought flowers at the grocery store and put them in a wine bottle with a little water and an aspirin. He put them on the nightstand. There, for her, so the room wouldn't smell of him.

He took the ingredients from the plastic bag that said, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You in red block font on the side. He took out the butcher block. He smashed, peeled, and chopped the garlic. He halved, skinned, sliced, and chopped the onions. He blinked, he blinked, he blinked. He put the onions in a bowl. He put the onion bowl where it wouldn’t bite his eyes. He quartered the brussels sprouts and put them in a bowl. He put the big pan on the range and swirled olive oil supposedly from Tuscany on it. He salted and peppered the steak. He ate a raw brussels leaf.

She didn't arrive. From the kitchen, through the living room, he went. He sat on the bed. He took the flowers from the bottle and drank the aspirin and flower water. It didn't really make him feel anything, but it was something different to do. It forced him to make a face. He’d found, but would never acknowledge, that he could do almost anything if he was alone and he stopped imagining somebody.

A little while later, he put the flowers back in a bottle with water, this time, for himself.

BODY BETRAYAL by Crow Jonah Norlander

April 26, 2020

When I reached the age at which my older friends started to complain about their bodies falling apart, mine really did. My infant son picked up a smooth piece and used it to soothe his gums. My wife palmed another, soft for warmth and whispers. Mom grabbed some with more defined edges to help set up her printer, while one other bit of me barely holding its shape looked on as dad skated around backwards. My boss’s part sat around ignored, waiting to get fired. The chunk of me attending to the Executive Board made the motion to call the question, voted in favor of the decision to rename ourselves the Steering Committee. We were unanimous in our desire to dispense with hierarchy. There’s some left to be claimed if anyone’s interested, if someone can think of something to do with it.

MANDALA by Vallie Lynn Watson

April 21, 2020

He always walked me to my car when I left his house after sex, so stealing his albums was tricky. Not stealing. Borrowing. I started in month two, initially one album at a time, always only the record itself. He’d have to excuse himself to the restroom five or six times an evening, and I’d barefoot across his new carpet to just outside his bedroom, where the shelves began. I would slip an album out of the cover and into my messenger bag, take them home until our next engagement—he usually asked me back within a week—and after sex, put it back in its cover, fetch a fresh one. By month three I was exchanging ten at a time, and by month six, eighteen, the most I could carry in my bag. He never mentioned any missing, and he certainly hadn’t noticed the condition I returned them in. He said he’d not played music since the summer, but I was scared that he didn’t want me around for the music. I always made the short drive home in silence.

I missed him, in the in-between. Sometimes there were phone calls, about our day, about our faraway families. He did most of the talking while I painted on his records, repeating dots, lines, and swirls, starting around the center label and fanning out, playing the record backwards, pulling fine-tipped brushes over the surface of the grooved vinyl, until side A was nothing but a kaleidoscope of color. I bought a kid’s turntable and let the B-sides play wavily, lifted by the uneven, dried paint beneath, while I slept.

A VERY SHORT STORY ABOUT TWO (THREE) FORMER FRIENDS by Eli S. Evans

April 15, 2020

On my fortieth birthday, my old friend A– sent me the following message: “Happy birthday, bro. Mark Fisher summited Everest last week.” As Mark Fisher and I hadn’t been friends for at least twenty years, this news was not meaningful to me except in so far as it provided a measure relative to which all of my own accomplishments in life suddenly appeared quite meager. And on the day of my fortieth birthday, no less! In bitterness, I composed the following reply: “That’s cool, but not as cool as when I summited your mom last night,” and only after not receiving a response remembered that A–’s mom had just recently died of something unpleasant involving, if I was not mistaken, her colon. Some months later, another old friend, J–, asked me if I’d heard the latest from A–. “No, and I don’t expect to,” I answered, and for the sake of explanation told him exactly the same story I’ve recounted here. When I finished, he was uncharacteristically silent at the other end of the line, at which point it dawned on me that it was actually J–’s mother, and not A–’s, who shortly before my fortieth birthday had died of something unpleasant involving, if I was not mistaken, her colon.

THE FULL LENGTH OF THE WALL by Darren Nuzzo and Toddy Smith

April 13, 2020

I watched him do it—down there in the alley beside our house. “Up to no good,” my wife said. “Can you handle it, Sam?” she asked of me. “I’ll handle it,” I told her. But I just watched. I watched this tall man from our bedroom window standing in the alley, near our things, near my wife’s car she’s almost paid off, near the flowers finally blooming from finger-painted pots, near my daughter’s purple tricycle we won in a raffle just last week, near all the things a husband is supposed to protect. I opened the window and leaned my head out. I cleared my throat to sell it to my wife that I might have it in me to yell, just how a man has it in him to yell. But I just watched. I watched this man spell his name with pee on our red brick wall. He had two hands on it. He moved left to right, knees slightly bent and angled outward so that his jeans wouldn’t drop any further. His long flannel was pulled up and stuffed between his teeth. His hips thrust forward like he was doing the limbo. He shuffled the length of the wall like a number of things that might shuffle the shoreline: a fisherman, a photographer, a lifeguard — no, not just a crab. He traveled a great distance, something I’ve never had to do being given such a short, weak name: Sam. But this guy, he really moved. The full length of the wall, like I’ve said. Two hands on it, like I’ve said. And just like that, it was over. He opened his mouth and let his shirt hang. Pulled up his pants, buckled his belt. He stepped back from the wall. Centered himself in front of his work. Admired it briefly. Pulled out his phone to take a picture. Held the camera sideways, had to. The wall lit up, eleven letters dripping down red bricks: Constantine. Now that’s a name.

ALL WORKED UP by Linda McMullen

April 8, 2020

He often simply appears in my office, insouciant grin and silver hair: “I want to show you something.” In the age of #metoo, he is carefully respectful of a female subordinate. No hands ever touch in the exchange of—

A binder with reference documents, paginated and neatly tabbed; a viciously indiscreet email from a colleague; a rare compliment on a memo from his own supervisor… Whatever it is. For my eyes.

For me.

Or: I’ve written his remarks for a major briefing the next day, and he invites me to pull up a chair, next to him, so we can amend and annotate. We talk about politics—TV, movies, books—and our colleagues—

—our spouses.

Or: By 7 p.m., he says, “I just want to go home and sit on my couch.”

I say, “Me, too.”

He grins, “You want to be on my couch?”

And then: half-laughing alarm. “Please forget I just said that.” The word career-ending hovers; I am painfully aware of my own femininity. But he doesn’t want to stifle the burgeoning… unspoken… whatever, either, so he launches into an anecdote about his runaway mouth. And one or the other of us references a “No touching!” moment from Arrested Development.

Because.

And I shut my door, sometimes; I try to dispel this abysmally adolescent captivation. I tell my private rosary: I’m a mother. A professional. An adult. I adore my husband.

And I—we—

—chose work rooted in realism. And devoted to the art of the achievable.

Then I remember we have a meeting to prep.

Or we have a joint phone call in his office.

And our building has an open-door ethos.

And so I open it again. And I vacillate between self-loathing at becoming such a morally compromised cliché and vapid daydreams that would embarrass a self-aware twelve-year-old.

He pops his head in the door. And I try, so very hard, to suck in my cheeks.

TO TEACH by Tyler Barton

March 30, 2020

Whenever she passes a picture she’s in, Jewell closes her eyes. She laughs. Jewell’s earlobes are drippingly long, and her granddaughter Tanny would like to see them pierced nine, maybe ten times. This makes Jewell laugh. Jewell has been convinced by friends to join the poetry club, because, they say, Jewell is always finishing their sentences with a slant rhyme, and damnit they want the real thing! Jewell laughs at them. The poetry teacher is a bear of a man at a pottery wheel until Jewell is told he is the pottery teacher. Jewell laughs through her apology. The poetry teacher is twirling with joy at something Lucille Clifton said. “That woman is a loon,” a poet in a wheelchair whispers. Laughing, Jewell watches the poetry teacher teach, but then she sees that the poetry teacher walked out of her apartment that morning and screamed a mean thing because she saw a ticket on her windshield, but then—and this is what tickles Jewell—when she saw that it was only a papery yellow ginkgo leaf, the poetry teacher screamed an even meaner thing. Jewell discovers this moment in the poetry teacher like a crumb in a man’s beard. As the poetry teacher speaks of inspiration and fearlessness and squeezing the muse’s two cheeks, Jewell sees through to the room where both screams started, small as pepper seeds. Jewell’s hand is up. The poetry teacher says, “Yes, you?” Jewell slides down out of her chair and crawls across the carpet toward her. “Here,” she says. “It’s a haiku.” Jewell doesn’t listen to her classmates’ gasps as she peels a leaf from the woman’s shoe. The yellowness turns to orange in her mouth. Then, blue. She can’t laugh while she chews or she’ll puke.

RESCUE 60640 by Megan Carlson

March 1, 2020

Google Search History (retrieved 11/14/2019)

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AFTER A MONTH, WE MEET FOR DINNER by Francine Witte

February 27, 2020

First thing I notice, new haircut, the grays dyed clean away.

I’m careful with my words. Nice shirt, I finally say.

I’m aware he never dressed this nice for me. I found it in my closet, he says.

The waitress brings a basket of bread.

You look good, he says. I can smell the scratches on his neck. They smell like blood and sex and another woman.

Would you like some bread? I ask.

Cutting down, he says, pointing to his stomach, flatter than I recall.

The waitress returns, and we order small. Nothing that will take too long.

The bread is piled high in the basket. The smell is filling up the air between us. When I look at him again, he has the eyes of a ghost.

My shoulders sink, and I grab a piece of bread. I bite into it, final and hard, because, frankly, it lets me.

A NOTE TO YOKO OGAWA by Michael Farfel

February 21, 2020

a note to Yoko Ogawa,

I think that others might say you make key lime pie like all other confections. You pick the fruit—found in trees and sometimes pockets—and you open it and line it up and chop. It takes patience, of course, to form the pastry dough and fold it out and fill it up.

I found a recipe, in the back pages of your books, a sort of misdirection in the language and the wording. A few drops of this, a subtle push and an open door. A room revealed. A kitchen and a stove. The fruit is there and a table and a chair. And with caring, and with time, the pie reveals itself.