Micah Piero Salmon Champagne
by Cara Dempsey
I.The Angel Gossips
My guardian angel is so hung up on trashy magazines.
She’s a sucker for celebrity divorces and baby names. They crack her up. You know the ones. Those A-lister babies with names like Micah. Piero. Salmon. Champagne.
Paper Scissors
by James J. Hatfield
((( )))
Mrs. Sasser stood behind me with her arm over my chest. The back of my head at her belly button. The woods behind our house looked like it was at the bottom of some ocean full of fire.
In the haze of the smoke and the orange and yellow backlight, I saw a dark shape come out. It looked like one of them stories from the Bible, I don’t know which.
Tom Hanks Is Still A Good Idea
by Nicholas Grider
Tom Hanks is a good idea. Like many good ideas (such as loyalty, consonance, simultaneity, Photoshop, and pockets) it may seem as if Tom Hanks must be naturally-occurring and evolved long ago when fresh water was easier to locate and imbibe than to purchase on sale in bulk. Idea experts have yet to reach a consensus, but in the meantime, let’s take a closer look at why Tom Hanks is such a good idea, may always have been and might forever light our way, never fading from the firmament the way that laugh tracks and summer camp and the Electoral College have, tenacious though they may be, the flower’s torn which Tom Hanks removes before handing it to us, so let’s delve deeper into the nexus of goodness and distraction and “Jimmy Stewartification.” Shall we? Let’s.
The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein
by Iris Smyles
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography
I think I was a genius in my last life that is that I was the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas who was Gertrude Stein which is partially why I quit my job. The Aquarium is no place to cultivate genius.
Pet Culture
by Aditi Natasha Kini
Every time she had been broken up with before — because Karishma had never ever broken up with anyone, it was too difficult — her friends seemed to not care. It was funny to her, actually, how little they cared, and at its core, comforting. It made those breakups feel inevitable. But maybe it meant her friends didn’t actually care.
Pet Buddha
by Francis Levy
No one paid attention to me. I was invisible. I was just one of those guys who spend their life filling out forms, paying bills, filing taxes on time for fear of being imprisoned, and dealing with the next minor emergency—the dead car battery, the leaking radiator that seemed to define the passage of my days.
People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You
by Zoe Goldstein
I moved in with my neighbor Anastasia and her girlfriend Franklin after my little marriage drove itself clear off the interstate.
I was 27 and in the mood for whatever. I didn’t know to what extent I would keep “going” with my life.
The Trash Man’s Daughter
by Vic Sizemore
She was one grade above Malachi, but two years older. Her name was Lydia Cumba, and in Malachi’s fifth year, she showed him that life was more than toy cars, bicycles, and baseball. Lydia was seven and Malachi five when she tried to teach him about sex. To Malachi, sex was still a strange and forbidden world: his dad was a Fundamentalist Baptist preacher. Malachi heard an older boy at church call another boy a cunt, and carried the word home to use on Matthew—his mom rubbed Ivory soap on his tongue, made him rinse and spit, then did it to him again. His dad would not even use words like panties and boobs unless he was quoting an unsaved person.