By 4:30 PM on November 22, 1936, the sun had set, the sky was black. The four people in The Passavant Hospital Maternity Ward could not tell if the sun was up or down. It did not matter. Dad, Uncle Richard, Grandma Bess, and Grandma […]
The Daycare Next Door by Amy Lyons
My neighbor planted a plastic swing-set, staked into dirt a domed cage for climbing, and dubbed her lawn daycare. Brown and blue footholds studded green panels for budding belayers to practice their scaling. A fat cartoon car with yellow blind spots idled near trash cans, […]
Dough by Hannah Sutherland
It begins, and ends, with sourdough bread. Ellis is in the kitchen, baking. He’s been kneading, stretching, folding, repeating. He holds the dough to the light and stretches until it’s almost translucent, then proves it, watches it slowly double in size. Clara comes over and […]
Wake the Dead by S.E. Hartz
Fact: sleep deprivation can be used as a form of torture, bending perception until you offer whatever answers you must to escape, not dissimilar to the frantic bargaining of grief. I also read that you do sleep throughout the drought, quantum micro-slumbers keeping death at […]
About Zane by Celesté Cosme
Mrs. Johnson, I received your message on my answering machine concerning Zane’s tardies and absences. I’ve talked with him about missing the bus. I go to sleep around 8 P.M. most evenings and though I tell Zane to go to sleep soon after, I know […]
Still Life by Lucy Goldring
I gift you a fruit bowl to say ‘Happy New Home’. To my boys? No. Practise this: to my son and his father. The underside is lacquered red; only the cradle bares the grain. Your eyebrows rise-fall-rise as you consider the bowl, the motherly gesture. […]
Daylight Savings by Kelle Schillaci Clarke
Tomorrow, her phone’s weather app predicts a thirty percent chance of rain at 9 a.m., sixty percent by 10 a.m., and one hundred percent between the hours of eleven and two. She’s willing to accept the iffiness of the morning hours, placing her and her […]
Back to Milwaukee by Linda McMullen
Ellen unclasps her American flag pin from her blazer, and tucks it into her purse; she glides into a bathroom stall where the pantsuit and heels come off, and she resumes her jeans, sneakers, and flannel. They’re a size too large, now. She hails a cab. En route […]
Blue Ghosts by Margaret LaFleur
The boys stopped calling after their mother died. It was only Hope that kept up the tradition, sitting down with a cup of coffee and dialing her childhood phone number as she watched steam curl above her mug. If her father was back from church […]
Snowball by Caroljean Gavin
It all happened when the polar bear chased me to the end of the glacier and I was so, so frightened to leap in the icy waters. You see, I had no faith left to leap with. Just a heart that was somehow still warm, […]
Gestalt (noun): a theory that a whole is different from and more than its disparate parts by Rachel Abbey McCafferty
Four. You are at your uncle’s house and your parents said you could get a pet for your birthday. His dog had pups a few weeks ago and now you are surrounded in tan and white fur, cold noses and small paws pressing against you. […]
Dorothy Parker talks about aging; Virginia Woolf chimes in by Alice Lowe
“The best you can do about it is the best you can do about it,” Dorothy Parker said on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. Middle age was an anathema, middle anything “the label of frump.” She said “People should be one of two things, […]
