FARM HANDS by Mark Abdon
The rocking horse was hideous, though. It was the eyes. Wide open and vacant, set too high on that giant head. The foot-pegs had snapped off on Black Friday.
DOCTOR’S VISIT by Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez
While we wait for the fruits of deliberation, my mother asks me to get personal. I tell her I’ve been nightmaring about getting kidnapped and beating the captor up.
POWER OUTAGE by Zsófia Czakó; translated by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess
She looked at that tree as if it were a murderer, and with hate in her eyes told me that in her dreams every night she sneaks over with an axe and chops it down with two strokes.
SPILL by Christina D’Antoni
At night I dreamt of pelicans strung up in the oaks by their beaks, choked in Spanish moss, the storm’s winds blowing them down. Cars sliding through gasoline, smearing their bodies into the street.
WHATEVER by Emma Estridge
She emails me a PDF of instructions. The first is Learn to sit quietly with yourself. I feel that we have already skipped a step.
HEATERS by Brett Biebel
There was a fence, and there were holes in it, and she looked like a lizard sometimes, a shitload of speed coiled inside some slender frame.
THREE by Amanda Gersh
I used to say I couldn’t travel because I didn’t have the time, but now I’ve got all the time in the world because the world isn’t using it.
THE CARRIAGE ROOM by Mary Ann McGuigan
He returned home silent, even more sullen. I asked him about Mrs. Marra once, but he looked at me as if all memories, good or bad, had been erased.
JACKFRUIT by Gwen E. Kirby
Now that your precious jackfruit is out in the world, latch the angel onto your body and let nature take its course. She held her jackfruit to her breast, to her arms, her neck, rubbed it against herself until she was raw.
SWEETNESS by Tina Kimbrell
On the morning that she died, I don’t think I knew that it was the day that we would stop waiting. We were just going to her bedside, as we did. As we had done for days. Suspended in that grief fog, gritty and spinning.