Sunday Stories: “Eric’s Evening”

Sparrow

Eric’s Evening
by Emma Horwitz

Eric, shoving his cock in and out of the hot cantaloupe he’d sent for a spin in the microwave, took a pause. Someone had just broken into his apartment. This was particularly ill-timed, as Eric had spent the better part of the afternoon getting it up and hard in the first place, jacking himself to hell and back alone in the early morning elevator car, teasing at the sliding skin of his shaft with a rogue hand as he rearranged the tuck of his shirt at work, pinching a nipple on the subway ride home from the grocery store where this particular melon had been selected. He had wanted to tell someone while in transit of the hardening underneath his pants’ zipper, proud of the day’s accomplishment. But, looking around the crowded car, he wasn’t sure who to share himself or his successes with, and so he decided instead to stare at his cantaloupe swaying in its plastic bag, knocking into the knee of another man, traveling with his own items, standing in his own pants, a cock of his own that Eric would likely not see, though not for lack of imagination. 

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Sunday Stories: “Big Bike Man”

bike

Big Bike Man
by Stephen A. Geller

Harry’s office door is closed when he’s talking to a patient. If it’s slightly ajar, he’s at his desk, music in the background, reading medical journals or writing a scientific paper. 

Today, Harry was standing at the window, just staring out.

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Sunday Stories: “Brandy Fucking Melville”

nyc

Brandy Fucking Melville
by Amy Zimmerman

It was the summer Lana Del Rey insisted she didn’t glamorize abuse, that she was just a glamorous person who wrote a lot about her abusive relationships. Kerry didn’t like Lana as much as people probably thought she did, but she acknowledged that they were kindred spirits: poets who didn’t write poetry, witches who couldn’t cast spells, white girls who saw heterosexuality for everything it was—passé, violent, exhausting, elective—and did it anyway. 

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Sunday Stories: “The Chorus”

cicada!

The Chorus
by Amelia Beckerman

A week in, it feels like the bugs have always been here. Dad, always quick on the uptake, wastes no time outfitting the house and cars in cicada-resistant armor. The windows and screens are all checked, locked, taped down. He finds a mosquito net, from a mission trip Charlie took during his Jesus-phase, and builds a fort around the front door. When you want to go outside, which I do not, you first have to get goggles and an old auction paddle from the mudroom and follow a carefully choreographed routine that involves opening the door a sliver, sticking your arm through the hole, and waving the paddle around like the only remaining painting of your great-great-grandfather has just been placed on the auction block. 

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Sunday Stories: “Punxsutawney Phil and the Executioners in Top Hats”

Groundhog

Punxsutawney Phil and the Executioners in Top Hats
by Bo Fisher

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and neither am I that other thing they say I am. I don’t say the word. My mom has no problem saying it, and neither does Row who’s rummaging through her bag at the door as we speak. It’s only that when the cigarette smoke starts to mix with the early February snow on the Ohio that my head gets foggy and I have to part the debris to see what really is. I can still see it, and though they cannot, I can empathize with their blindness—I can empathize. Row doesn’t care to look at the goddamn snow, and that’s why she’s mumbling something or another about my concerns regarding the government’s contamination of our tap water and how cigarette ash has become hotter in the last three years. 

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Sunday Stories: “A Vigorous, Mostly Happy Couple”

radio tower

A Vigorous, Mostly Happy Couple
by Bob Johnson

By the time the raccoons appeared, Mickey had run out of excuses. The apple tree had fallen in a summer storm and he’d left it sprawled across the yard for days, until the masked creatures appeared and began feasting in the rot. They stared toward the house in the daytime and climbed the deck at night to peer in the sliding kitchen door, scaring the bejesus out of Mickey’s wife Kate and the chocolate lab Bosco. 

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Sunday Stories: “The Poor Things”

Duffel bag

The Poor Things
by Tessa Torgeson 

When I checked into Sunny Prairie Detox and Rehabilitation Center in Fargo, my whole life fit into a puke-green duffle bag. The first week was a gauzy haze. I staggered through the place like a feral animal concerned only with my primal needs. Wake up, puke, take my morning pills, masturbate before groups, eat, nap, go to AA, take my night pills, masturbate again, sleep. A week later, once the doctors said the demons were purged from my system, they moved me across the street to the Rehabilitation unit, housed in a former 2-story office building. 

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Sunday Stories: “The Surrogate”

lock

The Surrogate
by Marlene Molinoff

Brian and I looked up when she knocked on the doorframe of his hospital room. “Isn’t she beautiful!” he whispered, echoing my thoughts. Marianne Depinto was a trim, elegant woman with a halo of silver hair and huge, dark eyes that took in the room, then settled on him. 

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