Femme
by Lauren Sarazen
Before I was a wife, cooking was an adventure. I took pleasure in complexity then. Bringing home French cookery books, I’d spend hours decoding instructions in my second language. Time would pass slowly, whisking egg whites into tentative submission and anxiously surveilling slow-simmering bouillabaisse. My meringue would be over beaten and chunks of white fish were outrageously overcooked, but we’d laugh and eat it anyway.
The Tutor
by Tadhg Hoey
The Tutor receives a text from his supervisor before walking into Student B’s apartment building in the West Village. Student B is having a bad day. Student B answers the door, rolls his eyes, and without saying anything, disappears down the marbled hallway into the bathroom. Unpacking his bag by the living-room window, which looks out over Sixth Avenue, The Tutor notices a bottleneck of pedestrian traffic as people slow down and try to navigate around a homeless man who is lying face down on the sidewalk. In the bathroom, Student B is playing trap music on his phone.
Bear of a Kid
by Joseph Edwin Haeger
“Of course we’ll think it’s cute,” he said, taking a long sip of his lite beer. The suds washed down a piece of steak.
“She.”
“What?” He took another bite of steak, then took another swig a beer, letting the two sit in his mouth.
“You said ‘it.’ It is a she. You’d better get used to that quick. She’s going to be here any day.”
He swallowed the mixture in his mouth and breathed in. A smile spread across his face.
Crisis of Uselessness
by Sean Thor Conroe
Big cuz E hit me with the gig deets.
Four days to a week at a farm just outside of Bennington, way up in VT.
Probably shouldn’t have signed on, how fucked I felt.
How things didn’t look like they were getting any better.
Cysts popping up on palms and soles, didn’t know why.
Men In the Moon
by Mary B. Sellers
Angry velvet air and a curved comb of a moon—its mannish features tonight are fine-toothed and ashy, like the fresh outline of an elbow bruise. Ever since I was little people have told me he’s smiling up there—a not-quite-father-figure, presumably kind and probably old—but I can’t help wondering about his penis size or whether moon entities are even allowed those. I’ve never quite believed them, though. To me, he’s only a watchful stranger, vague as a ghost, constant as a headache. Just another man playing god for twelve hour shifts, like he owns the place, like he has some right to it. If the stars were a diner, he’d be their owner.
The Sunburned Cowboy
by David Byron Queen
When I met the cowboy on the bus to Palm Desert, I had a few months sober still and life was open and full of possibility. This was 1995. Everything I owned was in a suitcase in the compartment above me—toothbrush, socks, underwear, jeans, t-shirts, a box of nicotine patches, my father’s meditation tape, a tambourine, and a 1971 Selmer Mark IV saxophone that had once belonged to my father in a plastic music case. I looked good. I’d shaved my beard, gotten myself a haircut, and wore a neat dark suit my father had given me around the time he left, told me to wear it one day at the start of my career. And well, it had taken longer than some but there I was.
The Unlovables
by Treena Thibodeau
Zenobia thinks we should get a dog.
I don’t want a dog, I say. Who’s going to take care of a dog?
We both will, she says. My whole life I wanted a dog and no one ever let me get one. Come on, Tuck, it’ll make me happy.
Magic words: a way to make Zenobia happy. Something that will turn her toward me like the tumblers of a lock. We’re on the couch, and even after I let her pick the show and make her the popcorn she likes (coconut oil, freshly grated parmesan cheese, Zenobia frowning at the mess of the pot as if someone threw it sticky and smoking through our window. She loves messy things, like cheese popcorn and dogs, and hates mess), she still is not looking at the television but rather at an empty stretch of wall. I keep checking to see if there’s something crawling there. It’s unsettling.
Slopes
by Winona León
On the last day of eighth grade, I itch to slide out of my skin. The air hits my throat like a match, and I scrape my nails underneath my desk, carving my name into the splintered wood so that I will be remembered. The last bell finally rings and we’re let loose like animals. I look for Cara. When I find her, we lock arms and break away from the other students.