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.
All Matter & Chemistry
by Holly Pelesky
Adam #5 had no clue about Adams #1-#4. It wasn’t something easy to blurt out, I didn’t know how to bring it up. To my friends, my Adam proclivity (or some would say fetish) was a funny anecdote, something we could joke about as if it didn’t matter, something coincidental, harmless, humorous. But then again, none of them were named Adam.
Company
by Ronna Wineberg
Elaine sat in front of the computer, typing answers to the questions on the Silver Singles website. She was sixty-seven years old, divorced after a long marriage, looking for a man, a companion. Experimenting, really, to see what an online dating search would be like.
She had to give her history of relationships—married, separated, divorced, single, never married. She felt as if she was often considering the history of something. At the doctor’s office, she recited the history of medications, diseases. On Amazon, she scrolled to check the history of her purchases. At the repair shop, she told the mechanic the history of her car’s problems. She was often amassing information from the past and using it to create a future.
Man of God
by Vivian Lawry
You never heard of the Rev. Mr. Moses Abraham Davidson? He once preached from the mouth of a stuffed whale—but more of that later.
He rode to his calling in a pony cart, pulling a small wooden wagon in which rode a Chester White hog he called Hamlet. He taught Hamlet—the most civilized of barnyard animals—to fetch, sit, and stay. Hamlet ambled with the Rev on walks and lived in the back room of his house. They were accompanied by a white Great Dane named Baskerville.
t crystals s t holding & t crystals r t entitys o t holding
by Jim Woster
t crystals s t holding & t crystals r t entitys o t holding
lastfeb t vatican sent its shuttle 2 t crystals
t vaticans xplained god god & jesus god
they didnt try 2 xplain t spirit god cept they did xplain t organless conception o t jesus god
Potassium
by Arianna Reiche
I always think I’m too tired to go. Even as I’m telling myself I’ll skip this one, even as I turn my phone onto its face to suffocate the light, even as I wrap myself in my duvet, the one that smells like teenage me, curve my spine, and try to re-settle into the abyss of sleep – there my feet are, hitting the carpet. There I am, standing. I’m getting my coat.
CUNT
by Sylvia Math
I didn’t have very much to do with boys my own age, when I was 14-16, before I left home, but there were two. Both very nice. Nice Boy #1 was also sexy. He was tall and he had just the right slouch. There was absolutely nothing rebellious about anything he ever said or did. But you could feel it simmering. When I saw him again later when we were both in different colleges, of course he had green hair, eyeliner and a Flipper tee shirt (the one with the x’s on the fish’s eyes.) It was dull to hang out with him when we were 15 though.
Pro/Con
by Julia Meinwald
Good caviar was a vote against ending it all. When the night began, Sasha hadn’t known her own feelings on Royal Ossetra Caviar, but as the evening progressed, it emerged that she was a fan. She kept slinking back up to the counter, taking another of the small plastic espresso spoons the host seemed to have in endless supply, and dipping it directly into the jar, then side-stepping a few feet away to nibble the salty treat unnoticed. Not that there was anything wrong with eating caviar by itself, directly from the jar, she thought. And not that there was anything wrong with attending a party just to stand alone while people who knew each other trotted out stories about the time they ran into Maury Yeston at the opera but at first had not even recognized him. If she didn’t talk to someone in the next twenty minutes, Sasha decided, she would leave.