Steak and Potato
by Marin Kosut
I was born to vegetate. As a juvenile, I’d stare at my blank bedroom wall. I’d stare out at the driveway. Not even the sky or the ceiling. I’d lay on my bed looking down at the middle of my body and stay outside myself inside the house. I wrinkled with time on top of my sheets. Sometimes, admittedly, I flipped through the Pennysaver. I didn’t know nothing, but I wasn’t totally rotten.
The Traveling Mink Coat
by CAT Wyatt
My father, a military pilot during WWII, was on a training mission a month before Valentine’s Day, 1945. Urgently needing to find a present for my mother, he went into the town close to his training facility. He noticed a beautiful mink coat in a shop window, a luxurious full-length, mahogany-colored, sheared mink coat with a caramel-colored silk lining. The lining reminded him of my mother’s silky, taffy-blonde hair. After purchasing the coat, he waited while a seamstress embroidered my mother’s and his initials deep inside the left slit pocket. My father wrote a card and tucked it in the same pocket, knowing she was left-handed and always kept a handkerchief in her left coat pocket, knowing she would find the card and their initials.
Come Thru
by Claire Siebers
If you ask my cousin, Valentine, where his Aunt Maggie is, he’ll say, “Silver Springs, Illinois, at Grafton and Center Street.” My brother Leon is “644 Maple Street in Winnetka.” Our other cousin Graham is “78 Madison Place, Ann Arbor, Michigan” but also “Knight’s Market, on the drinking side.” Great Aunt Tali is “Beirut, Lebanon, where we’ll never go.” Val’s favorite question of all used to be, “Where’s Grandie?” to which he always responded, “22 Magnolia Lane, Lake Helen, Florida, otherwise known as the Gem of the South.” But now when I ask Val where our grandmother, Sylvia, is, he just says, “She’s dead.”
Turning
by Sylvie Pingeon
They are birds before they become children. Alight on the rocky beaches, picking orach, russian olives, the supple, tart thorns of the cat-briar which has not yet grown woody and sharp. At night, a tautog fish lulls them to sleep with angry murmurs. In the mornings, they awake to the sun rising. They wake together always, their salt-streaked bodies nestled close, Layla’s larger wing tucked over her little sister, Freya’s, fragile, pulsing back. There is no time, just now, and they soak in this nowness, let it saturate their feathers, drink it up through their beaks.
Ear
by Claire Hopple
We’re not supposed to see this. We’re just a couple of kids. Still, old enough to be culpable. Our eyes slowly adjust to the scene but nothing else adjusts. The facts start to land on us: Someone has torn apart Sofia’s cornfield. An individual has committed mayhem in the shape of a corn maze on our next-door neighbor’s property. An ordinary townsperson is at the forefront of corn maze design, but also maybe at the forefront of destruction.
The Storyteller as Mentor
(September 2002 to January 2003, Northern Ireland)
by Timothy DeLizza
In the fall after I graduated college, I flew from Brooklyn to Northern Ireland to apprentice under an established Irish storyteller who I’ll call Martha. After paying for my plane ticket, I had something like $1,000 in my bank account—and while Martha had agreed to cover room and board, the apprenticeship was not going to increase that number.
PCS Season
by Ilana Garon
I moved to Clarksville, Tennessee from New York City in July 2017, just six months into the Trump presidency. My soon-to-be husband Tim, an Army Major, had been assigned to the 101st Airborne Division of Band of Brothers-fame, now stationed out of Fort Campbell—a sprawling, industrial-looking 50,000-person garrison made up of old bunkers and concrete administrative buildings that straddles the state line between Tennessee and Kentucky.
The Onion
by Sacha Bissonnette
When Charles finished his volunteering at the library, he arrived home at exactly 5:16 pm. He knew it was exactly 5:16 pm because he checked his watch at the precise moment when he exited his car, walked up the driveway, and twisted the doorknob to enter his house. The first thing he saw when he came in was a large, singular onion sitting on his dining room table.