When I jerk awake, it’s still dark, my wife deep asleep beside me. I have a terrible stiff neck, and I think I can detect a lingering smell of blood. I had just dreamed that I had been sentenced to death by decapitation for an […]
Bathroom Kingdom by Yash Seyedbagheri
Mother and I hide in the bathroom. Dad yells outside the window each night. Calls Mother a social criminal. A dreamer. He’ll make me a fighter. Some nights he fires his guns. Never blasts the windows. Just blasts into the air. We’ve been camped out […]
Fragility by Sara Dobbie
1. Now It’s noon on Sunday. You stand on your front porch, frozen, staring in disbelief at the schoolyard across the street from your house. The entire mangled front end of a car is in the air, its underbelly propped against the chain link fence […]
Choices by Lori Cramer
Rushing through the mall on your lunch hour, you spot Joanie in the food court. How long’s it been? Two years? Three? She looks the same. Well, maybe a little sloppier. She’s got on sweats and a baseball hat, her hair gathered into a messy […]
The Bridge by Lucy Zhang
The area beyond the bridge is said to be haunted: where the fallen red leaves halt at the bank and a short, flat rectangular piece of concrete extends over a rivulet–barely even an arm’s length above water. Teal balustrades cage the bridge in, the posts […]
Shade Tree Haven by Mitchell Toews
On hot Sundays, I often think of the Tourist Park in Ste. Anne. Their new concrete pool was a cube punched into the grass and filled to the white-tiled rim, the water mirror bright. With our family bakery twenty miles distant—dark, quiet, and still—Dad would […]
Farmland Reverie and Newsprint by Mary Ellen Gambutti
Farmland Reverie In reverie, I escape the moral uncertainty of these times into a place where sweet air satisfies and the spirit of nature presides. Such a place of calm is a remnant of rusticity that called me in my youth to restore a […]
Invented Love by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri
I’ve tried to invent the perfect mother. I should be packing boxes, but it’s exhausting stripping a room of history. Connection. One mother is foul-mouthed, rife with gruff glamour. Smoking cigarettes, with one of those voices like Marlene Dietrich. She’s the kind who doesn’t pronounce […]
Devil Painting by Robert Boucheron
On a wall over the dining table hung a large painting, oil on canvas in a gilded frame. The painting showed a young woman in a long white gown and blond braids. She stood on a stage with her mouth open. Behind her stood a […]
Where by Erica Dawn
“Where were you last night?” We’ve already had this conversation twice this morning. She’s forgotten it again. So I explain one more time. Slowly because she has to read my lips and now her eyes are going, too. “Mom, I was here last night.” It […]
Tree Stump for Babies by Joanna Friedman
Motherhood didn’t start on a dark and steamy night. Or by accident. Or in the back seat of a car. It started the first month after her husband said yes to a baby. The day the test read positive, she swore she’d only tell him, […]
Curb Sofa by RJC Smith
I came home from work and sat in the sofa we had dragged off the curb a few weeks earlier. I say ‘in’, rather than ‘on’, because I would sink into it. It was way too big for one person, but not big enough for […]
