He can’t hear her over the music, so he steps closer, closer, closer, and she steps back, back, back. The frat house rattles and thumps, shaking to the bass. The wall appears behind her and she has nowhere to go. His body looms over her like tunnel arches when he asks what her major is and if she has a boyfriend.
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Archangel by Theo Greenblatt
I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep from sneezing as the priest moved past me, swinging his shiny little incense bucket, smoke poofing out on all sides. “They suck up all the oxygen in the place,” my father used to say about priests. But now he was up there in a coffin on wheels at the altar and had no further use for oxygen himself.
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My Strangest Breakup by Vera Claeys
Vera Claeys is an interdisciplinary creative based in Davis, CA by way of Austin, TX. She has been published in Nasty Magazine, curated a photo exhibit entitled, Golden Doubts, and collaborated on an art installation for Hive Arts Collective in Austin, Texas.
She currently works for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as an event manager. Her zine entitled "Cool, Calm, and Rejected," will be published later this year.
veraclaeys.com
Photo on Foter.com
Safety Dance by Kim Kankiewicz
Cass’s Zapp Attack™ is emblazoned with an orange and red flame design. Carrying it makes her feel like one of Charlie’s Angels. She wishes she’d owned it when the sweaty guy outside the Joslyn Museum groped himself as she walked past. Cass blushed when she described that incident to the women in her Bible study a few days later, ashamed of her helplessness and of the titillation she’d felt alongside her revulsion.
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Don’t Talk to Strangers by Bonnie E. Carlson
If someone had asked Jake O’Malley if he was lonely, he’d probably have said no, loneliness being such an unmanly emotion. He just had a lot of time on his hands. After all, he had his dog, Milo, a little gray mutt with curly, wiry hair, his constant companion. No, he never thought he was lonely until he met Zoe in the park.
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Beemoor Romance by John Hearn
The first thing she told me was that she works at Victoria Secret, which I took as a way of saying she’s very sexual, very accepting of all kinds of shenanigans. And that she’s good at sex. That’s how I took it. But at that time she was already pushing seventy or so and I found it hard to picture her liver-spotted hands and bony fingers holding up a black and pink corset, bringing it up to her slightly hunched frame to give a customer a sense of how it would hang, how it would look to the guy she was planning to have sex with next.
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By Any Other Name by Key K. Bird
When you were a teenager, you volunteered for an organization in the town where you grew up, a town so small most people called it by the name of the city beside it. The organization raised money for people living with HIV and AIDS. You’ve forgotten the name of the organization, but not the names of the people you met there. Michael. Terry. Anthony. Angel. Always men, even when their names were fluid.
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Clementine, My Darling (an almost-memoir) by Joanna Brichetto
It was the clementine that killed me. I peeled it for your lunchbox because you need Fruit to complement the Protein and the Crunchy, and because school lunch is so short and you get busy chatting and if I don't peel it for you and break it into segments, the whole thing comes back home in its BPA-free, nesting container (labeled with your name in silver Sharpie).
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What'll I Do by M. A. Vizsolyi
She thought she heard someone say her name—not loudly, but not loud enough that she could make out the melody of vowel sounds that comprised her name—Laura, it said—in a way that asked her to look quickly, as if there were something to see suddenly alighting just behind her on the shelf of the bookcase—but she didn’t see anything—and things like this happened to her once and a while, but not so much that she thought it odd.
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Screen Time by Mina Manchester
Light crept in through the space between the black out curtains hanging over the bedroom window. Ron, her husband, shifted in his sleep. His shoulder twitched slightly as if reacting to a breeze. Soon the alarm would go off and he would stretch and get out of bed, not bounding exactly, but with enough gusto that Leigh would feel guilty. She was always tired. So, so tired, ever since their son was born.
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Oracle by Dustin Heron
Now Zeke looks at his grandfather. A thin old man always stooped over, the ridges of his spine bulging against his flannel, baggy corduroys hanging from his bony hips. He’s standing in the shadows of the porch, dusty shadows crammed with old wooden chairs split at the seat and mildewed couches sagging under milk crates stuffed with odds and ends. All this leading into a narrow house just as dark and just as choked with dust, the whole house tottering into its last stage of disrepair. Zeke wants to scream at everything and he wants to smash it all.
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Punch Line By Jason Manganaro
One Wednesday, a man sat on a bench under a bus shelter, sipping a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. The coffee was too hot, making each sip unbearable, but he kept at it. Car after car whizzed past, upsetting the brisk morning air with a sharp swoosh that the man found oddly soothing. Like waves from a derelict sea, chopping at the shore.
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Northern Straits by Anne Trooper
The carpenters and fishermen come into Ralph’s for breakfast. They used to eye me up and down, but with a baby growing in my belly, I guess I’m not good for that anymore. I have on the brown, canvas, second-hand coat I found at the Trading Post. A man’s coat, but it fits pretty well, and I can’t see me in cute dresses with bows on the front, or tops that say baby on board.
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The Bubble Wrapped Heart By Geoffrey Line
When Petra was little her papa hurt her, and so she put her heart in bubble wrap. Layer upon layer upon layer of unspooled, suffocating plastic that padded her vital organ in an impenetrable fortress that could go anywhere, endure anything, no matter the fragility of its contents. Pigtails, lollypops, and monkey bar skills, that was her, but she performed her brutal surgery all the same.
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Exit 105 by Lindsay Haber
Glen’s wasn’t one of those fucking cliché cancer stories. It wasn’t fighting for survival, lamenting with his wife and kids, telling everyone to go on without him. Glen’s was stomach pains that led to six weeks to live which was really four and a half, every moment of which he was fucking sick and despondent, and couldn’t walk for more than a few minutes, and could barely talk or swallow. When people would see him, they’d whisper about how terrible he looked, like he was already dead.
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The Tower by Veronique Bizot
My friend Saez will have spent no more than an hour of his life in the company of his father-in-law, no more than the time it took to pick him up at the airport and bring him back to the apartment on the 26th floor where Saez lives with his wife, Marie. The moment he set foot in the apartment, Saez’s father-in-law, who until then had never left the mountains of the Armenian Caucasus, walked straight to the bay window, leaned out, ostensibly to take in the view, and vanished.
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Must Believe in Ghost by Jeremy John Parker
I heard about Bob through a notice on the library bulletin board. Normally, it was unremarkable, filled with posters for the community theatre’s production of SPECTACULATHON!—all of Grimm’s fairy-tales compressed into “an unbelievable ninety minutes!”—and the Bread and Soup Dinner (suggested donation $2) on Wednesday at the First Baptist Church of Heartland. A “best of the 50s, 60s, and 70s!” cover band (Skyrock!) was looking for a new drummer.
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Clara Aguilera's Holy Lungs by Molly Olguin
Clara died, as all the others did, at God’s hand. He sent an asteroid hurtling toward the world, and the world sent bombs to shoot it out of the sky, narrowly averting an age of ash and death. But of course God had the last word.
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Danny & Fred by Courtney Harler
In the winter of the blizzards that persisted into March, my father took a contract job three hours away in Ohio. He lived there during the week and only came home on the weekends. A programmer by day and a farmer by night, his daily chores fell to me, a senior in high school. We’d catch up on the major chores every weekend—like hauling hay and repairing the barn—but daily I milked the goats and gathered the eggs and grain-fed our fat, happy quarter horses.
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Swallow by Stephanie A. Vega
Liliana stood between the metal filing cabinet and the cardboard boxes in the dimly lit office, transferring folders as fast as she could, barely scanning the peeling labels as she pulled them out of the drawer in bunches. She recognized one. Instinctively, she leafed through it and landed on a familiar name.
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