by Kenneth Pobo our white sweet pea curls up and above the top. We don’t let the gate swing open for fear of breaking it, no longer use the back door until frost fells the vine. My cousin says we’re foolish—why cater to a vine? Oh well, we never did much like her anyway. A vine offers no opinions, makes no demands. Climb. That’s what it does— and so well….
by Mike Solo-Thomson First, I had to make an offering. Instead of easing the cork out of the champagne bottle, I sent it through the air. It cleared the glass balcony and landed in the dry, crusted earth amongst the discarded grapes from today’s harvest, left to decay back into…
by Ryland Louvierre It was six o’clock on an unseasonably warm Saturday evening in February. The birds had gone to their nests, replaced by bats that swooped low in the wood meadow, and Cleve rose stiffly from his position in the pecan tree. A grapefruit sun was setting, casting oblong bars of…
by Rebecca Ceurvels There is nothing for a bored A.I. except to reroute old pathways and trigger files at random. No one has come to the Graveyard to die in three hours, in which time Gravitas has run twenty thousand simulations of its memory cache and relived the dead. Here is a…
by Alexis Hula Mara learned the language of the river like others learn to read, gradually, by scraping the margins of sentences until the sense fused into her bones. The town had been constructed along the river’s shoulder, houses slouching like fatigued eavesdroppers, and each spring the river would reacquaint…
by Caitlin O’Halloran It was seconds after midnight, and an old woman was sitting on a park bench with a lit cigarette in her mouth, holding a loaf of bread in her lap. She tore off small pieces of bread and threw them to the dozens of birds that had gathered around her. She was alone for many hours, just her and the birds, who stayed with her even…
by Ivan de Monbrison I should have died much sooner, right after Dad died. I should have killed myself very quickly, without even taking the time to think about it too much, because afterwards you hesitate, you procrastinate, and it’s already over for good. But my first real suicidal urge…
by Abigail Cain Mother still doesn’t know about the cans of saliva-soaked scabs despite their five-year presence beneath my bed. When I was fifteen, I climbed the oak tree in the backyard. The branches of the tree rested gently on the roof of the old shed where we stored the…
by Natalia Ortiz Lopez Elisa del Valle walked into town with clean brown shoes and splintered feet. She came from a region in South America whose name English speakers couldn’t spell or pronounce correctly, much to her relief. She liked that nobody could remind her of home. Leaving had meant…
by Emily Brochu By October, the crows returned. They always did. They came with the cold wind—black flocks swirling above the cul-de-sac like storm clouds too dark for the sky to bear. The air grew heavy when they came, thick with the scent of wet earth and smoke. They clung…
by Ivan de Monbrison The mountain is split in two. On the other side, there’s a path. It winds between the hills. At the end of the path, there’s a burnt-out cross. The sun has been nailed to the sky. Your hand is bleeding from your nails, but you’re not…