Eugene OR by Mary Breaden Tonya first noticed the sandwich shop on her bike ride to West Eugene High School in the fall of her junior year. Every day, she rode her bike down Green Hill Road to a smooth, newly paved road that wound through a housing development, past the under-construction sandwich shop, another half-mile past topless bars sealed up from outside light, and finally past an unpaved street of roadside motels you could rent by the hour. Years […]
Sunday Stories: “Lumbar Radiculopathy”
Lumbar Radiculopathy by Tyrese L. Coleman The Doctors call it sciatica or lumbar radiculopathy, that pain burning my hips when I stand up in the morning or the numbness when I’m driving and cannot feel when my toes press the pedal along with the rest of my foot, or the stiffness when I don’t exercise for a few days and my back feels like a board is strapped to it, and if I try to bend forward or backward or […]
Sunday Stories: “The Hard Small Fact of Men”
The Hard Small Fact of Men by Lynn Steger Strong I wish he’d held my ankles, pulled my hair. He was twenty-three and still a virgin, had never left the small town where he grew up and would later raise his kids: clichés were all he had. It was summer; I was seventeen and working in Wyoming. They called me jailbait and sent me off with him because he was so sweet and safe and good.
Sunday Stories: “Lemongrass”
Lemongrass by Francesca Ekwuyasi At 6:43 am last Wednesday, Kareema banged on my door with so much force that she bruised her knuckles. She was distraught, with a heavy book bag slung over her narrow shoulders and a red silk scarf still wrapped over her thick locs.
Sunday Stories: “Egg Foot”
Egg Foot by Meg Pokrass My friend’s wife is stuck at home because her feet stopped working. Otherwise she’d be going places. She calls her condition “Egg Foot”. “Incurable” she says. “Unless treated”. This she tells me in an e-mail after her husband has flown. I google “Egg Foot” and after stumbling upon countless foot fetish photos, I stop. But maybe because of the strange photos, I can’t help imagining her foot on my stomach, toes digging in, warm and […]
Sunday Stories: “The Loud Stereo”
The Loud Stereo by Sheila Martin The song battered Rachel’s head—“Heroin” with its electric viola and cello bow screeching over three guitar strings, so loud she was drowning in it, her aching, throbbing skull crashing against the rocks, Lou Reed’s drugged-out voice singing, “It’s my wife and it’s my life, because a mainer to my vein leads to a center in my head, and then I’m better off than dead …” screeching louder and faster, the pitch of manic intoxication.
Sunday Stories: “Dead Weight”
Dead Weight by Harold Stallworth 1. Barkley is either too old or too fat to climb up the stairs to our second-floor condo. Sadly, the promise of leftover beef and broccoli is no longer enough to lure him up the stairs after his morning walk. To be fair, the stairs are especially tall and steep, and there are few things that I dread more than scaling them after a long day of work.
Sunday Stories: “The Most Important Night of Their Lives”
The Most Important Night of Their Lives by Zack Graham We have a boy (Sam) and a girl (Alicia) who believe they are in love. She’s a pretty sophomore; he’s a popular senior with a baseball scholarship. They have no idea this is the most important night of their lives. It begins outside of a New Jersey train station.