HIGHWAY 25 by Lindsey Heatherly

August 26, 2020 · Fiction

I remember that night we parked at the drive-in on Highway 25 and steamed up the windows before static on the AM station switched over to previews. Previews came before a raunchy, college-age comedy, alternating between raindrop rivers and lip-locked intermissions that cut through windshield fog. Foggy windows were smeared by my gray cotton jacket through your steady hand. The hand that sat on my knee during a panic attack on the drive back. The drive through dark and rain and a flooded road too immersed for good traction on those too-old tires. Tires that skidded across water when you asked if I was okay and I just nodded my head. The head that bowed under the awning to get inside, when we stripped each other of soaked clothing, and I straddled your lap with my legs. We took laps around our troubles–the anniversary of your mom’s death passing quietly with brute force, the burdens of raising two boys alone, and my cycles of manic depression–and I told you I loved you and I was sorry it was a tough night, tough year. Tough tears you’d deny when your eyes welled up and so did mine, and we had the best sex we’d ever had on that couch while the rain just poured and poured. Words poured through your salt and pepper beard piercing my paper skin, leaving red welts I wish I could have peeled off and saved for now when I wonder if you still make the drive to work down Highway 25 or if you finally gave them the middle finger and found something better. Found someone better.

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ILLUMINATION by Audra Kerr Brown

August 22, 2020 · Fiction

Three weeks after her miscarriage, Guinevere fell in love with the lightbulb. A 40-watt incandescent globe from the dining room wall sconce. She removed the lampshade in order to stare at the glow of its tungsten filaments, the bare harp sitting above the bulb as a halo.

You are beautiful, Guinevere would say. Absolutely beautiful.

The light had an electrical heartbeat, a faint buzzing, as if bees were trapped inside.

She liked to unscrew the bulb from its socket, marvel at how perfectly it fit in her palm. How warm it felt. How round, how small.

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JUST OUTSIDE THE TUNNEL OF LOVE by Francine Witte

August 7, 2020 · Fiction

And Benny Jones telling me about Darlene. In other words, he pulled me through to unlove me.

Something about how love is a crispy pepper one minute, but then it goes wilty and soft. I told him I’m not a goddam pepper and get to the goddam point.

Problem is, I gave Benny Jones my heart too fast. My heart is a bristle I keep in my pocket and I can never wait to give it away.

Benny Jones sat in the boat in the Tunnel of Love, all squirm and tangle of words. Friends, he was saying, and didn’t mean to.

Then he pointed to a pin’s worth of light right there in front of us. “That’s the future,” he said. “It gets bigger and brighter the closer we get. All beautiful and warm.” I told Benny to shut the hell up. If we’re not a thing, we’re not a thing, but don’t go making a movie out of it.

When we did get outside the Tunnel of Love, into the future Benny Jones had promised would be warm and bright, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel anything. Just thought back to that summer at my grandma’s house, when her old dog, Punch, got a fever and she was going to shoot him. How I stroked Punch’s tan fur, telling him, it’s okay boy, when I knew damn well it wasn’t. My heart wriggling around in my pocket even then with no damn place for it to go.

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THE BEEP by Jason Schwartzman

July 16, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

I am his tutor and he is trying to tell me about an unknown variable. About X. But he has forgotten that it’s called X.

“The mysterious thing,” he says, laughing.

I love him for this. I will tell everyone I know about the mysterious thing.

During one session we’re in his apartment and I hear a beep. Just one beep. The microwave, probably.

“I’m really sorry,” he tells me, tensing up.

Sorry for what? It feels like I’m missing something.

“Totally fine!”

On the walk home I wonder why he was so on edge. Then I forget about it, my thoughts about him confined to the tiny sliver of the week we share. In the middle of another session, his mom comes home. She sits next to him, asks how it’s going. He’s taken the wrong test so we’re a little behind.

“I wish I had a baseball bat,” she says, smiling.

I see her smiling, so I automatically smile too, before I process what she might mean. Then she makes another comment, this time about throwing him off the roof. She smiles again.

I don’t know what I can say. Or do. Or if I’m just crazy. So far on the outside of something I can’t really see it. I say it’s not a big deal, the test. Not at all. He is doing well. Very well.

Sometimes I think about the beep. I also think he is okay, but I don’t really know. I’m not his tutor anymore.

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AFTER SWITCHING ANTIDEPRESSANTS, THE NIGHT STRETCHES by Matthew Mastricova

July 2, 2020 · Fiction

After switching antidepressants, the night stretches over his body as he lies next to you in bed, thinking about dying again, even though he would never tell you that. He would never tell you that for months it has been creeping out his mouth—his death, his parents’ deaths, his students’ deaths, the death (or non-death) that comes in the after death. When he is lucky, he can find an anchor: a pair of your socks balled hidden under the table or a can of apricot La Croix chilled for days. Leftovers of a from-scratch meal you cooked that he packed for a lunch he may or may not remember to bring. A reminder that you still live here—you still live. In bed he stretches across your body like a hand over a mandolin. His body a compass seeking your warmth, your pulse, your promise that when he wakes up your body will still be singing there with predawn light.

He will watch the night, the next three nights, pass over your body. He will tell you this, his pledge to try again another pill, only after he realizes that watching you, too, is just another way to die. But tonight is still early, or late, enough for him to promise that he will get better, drinking the clotted darkness between you till there is only your body, the sun.

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THE TODDLERS ARE PLAYING AIRPORT AGAIN by Tucker Leighty-Phillips

July 1, 2020 · Fiction

They’ve partitioned everything: the slide is the runway, the jungle gym is the terminal, covered in tiny travelers; anything with mulch is part of the operations area. Nobody flies. Nobody ever wants to be pilot. The toddlers love every aspect of the airport except for flight. Tickle always wants to be the rampie, loading freight onto planes with his sandbox bucket. Dasha is the lav agent, as she’s the best at keeping the plane’s bathrooms within regulation. Everyone wants to be Bill Boyer, Jr, CEO. They fight over his stock options until they shove one another and you have to step in and separate them, saying Lacy, you were Bill Boyer Jr. last time, why don’t we let Steve this time? One child reluctantly plays pilot and discusses weather conditions and itinerary changes with a dawdling crew chief, a snotty kid with both shoe strings loose-a-goose. This is most of their game, quiet discussions, loading and unloading bags into mouths of slides. This is the fourth time I’ve been routed through Tampa this week, pilot child groans while the other begins the aircraft’s push back, preparing for takeoff. They bicker over operating the tow motor. When you say, don’t you kids want to fly, just once, don’t you want to fly, they say that’s what everyone thinks on day one, you just come in and fly, no problem, like it’s a breeze, you just fly, but we’ve got an overnighter on a non-movement area and ATC is backed up to Glasgow and I haven’t had a single fruit snack today so forgive me if I’m a little on edge, Mr. Sky Cap, and you step back, remind yourself it’s just their game, babble with the other parents, and think of some great taxi propelling you through the sky, vaulting into the blue-and-white, traversing the mighty somewhere else.

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THE CORRECT HANGING OF GAME BIRDS by Rosie Garland

June 10, 2020 · Fiction

Rostrum

Select old, wild birds. Beware harsh beaks, horned spurs, claws toughened by years of defiance. Pierce the beak. Hang by the neck, the feet. Each man has his taste. Hook and hang them long enough to conquer disobedience.

Pectoral girdle

Keep them in the dark. Convert the cellar into a hanging room: a stamped dirt floor to absorb the moisture they shrug off, dense walls to absorb sound. Keep your birds separate. Even when dead, their warmth communicates from breast to breast, stirring discord.

Syrinx

Permit yourself the luxury of appreciation. This bird is yours, now. Dawdle on the ruffled collar, handsome as a rope of pearls around the throat; eye ringed with the purple-blue of bruising; jewel plumage so thick it weighs down the wings. You can’t imagine how she flapped or flew.

Breast

Pluck right away and you experience the thrill of naked flesh, but the body will dry out. Your bird is ruined. Wait three days, maybe seven. Then and only then, strip off the feathers. Patience. Flesh and innards need time to ripen. Sublime flavour is attained when skin loosens its grasp on muscle. She oozes oil and perfume.

Rump

A gentle incision. Slice skin, not meat. Slide in up to the wrist and spread your fingers. Unpeel her body like wet fruit. Relish satin texture, the greenish shimmer of perfect ripeness. Keep going. Fillet scraps from bone, a job less bloody than you expect. Persistence rewarded with flesh that yields to your authority.

Lesser coverts

Lock the dog in the yard, to stop it lapping up the puddles that collect under the carcasses. Ignore the neighbours complaining they can’t sleep. The smile that shuts them up faster than any bellowed argument. The way they shrink away.

Cloaca

Time passes without needing to pay it much attention. Nights in the cellar, waiting for your birds. Their toes dripping, their eyes glazed. All resistance drained from them. The silence is balm, the scent delectable and rare. If only the dog would stop barking.

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AN ALLEGORY by Dan Crawley

May 28, 2020 · Fiction

Take your brother to the orange grove, and do not let your friends throw rotten fruit at his head, or any other part of his body. Take your brother to Stop-N-Go, and do not spend these dimes on anything else but candy bars for you and him. Take your brother up to bed, and do not hide in the closet and scare him. Take your brother outside to play street football, and do not let your friends tackle him on the asphalt. Take your brother to school, and do not let him gawk and gag at all the dog poop on the lawns. And if he does, please, please, this time do not let him go into his classroom with the front of his shirt covered in his own spew.

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JAKE’S DÉTOURNEMENT by Ben Robinson

May 6, 2020 · Fiction

The concrete slab lies resting at the centre of a clear perspex bowl that had until just now been full to the brim of cake mixture, a potential Victoria sponge whose life is suddenly cut short. As of mere seconds ago, the sugar, eggs, flour, and butter are splattered all over the tabletop and kitchen walls, the encounter played out in a split second flash of joyous rage and violence. The boy’s name is Jake. He was raised in an all-female household with four elder sisters whose relationship with him could best be described as fractious. Ever teased and chided over his ginger hair and awkward demeanour, bitterness has long since taken a hold.

“Ginger nut fell in the cut and frightened all the fishes

A fish came up and ate him up,

And that was the end of ginger nut.”

It’s his sisters Lotte and Helena doing the baking, joint champions of the annual village competition five years in succession with a sequence of unanimous victories. Their winning recipes are closely guarded and their time at the kitchen worktop is mapped out with the utmost precision. It’s this picture of control that Jake is determined to upset. To aid him in this objective, an off-cut of building materials from the garden patio has been smuggled into this chamber of baking excellence. The slab sits in wait silently beneath the worktop on the mezzanine level above the kitchen. The girls have been working on this cake since early morning and Jake’s anger is righteous. His act will represent, in accordance with Debord's theory, "the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu."

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BROWN RECLUSE by Cody Pease

April 30, 2020 · Fiction

Their arrival to the reception is further delayed when he sees a spider on the tongue of his boot. Both men refuse to wear the boot now. The taller man traps the spider beneath a glass, as his partner tries to decipher what kind of spider it is. A brown recluse. The two men debate on how to dispose of it. The taller man offers to throw the glass far from the house. To let it sit in the snow and melt when spring comes. The shorter man is too kind and stubborn; he does not want the spider to freeze. He wishes he had the ability to cure the spider of its nature. To let it live in a dark corner of their house. Another pet. The taller man protests, then points to the neighbor’s porch. The neighbor’s windows are drawn shut. The shorter man finds an alcove beneath the porch, where it’s dark and warm. He shakes the glass but the spider remains still. He names the spider. This makes him feel better if the spider is meant to freeze. He leaves the glass sitting on the stone slab.

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