Complete Failure
by Joel Dane
When I couldn’t find a job in California, I decided to walk across the country. From the Santa Monica Pier to Coney Island. Things were going really well for me.
I imagine one of my ankles turning on the ice-plant, and beach sand clinging to my white tube socks. I imagine cigarette butts and seagulls but no people. No swimmers, no sunbathers, no car blasting I Left My Wallet In El Segundo.
Family History Of X
by Lori Jakiela
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my doctor, Dr. Johnson, who looked like the late great comedian Norm MacDonald and told late-great-comedian jokes and liked to draw stick-figure breasts on a whiteboard to show surgical options, asked, “Do you have a family history?”
Dr. Johnson had already drawn a pair of disembodied breasts before he asked this. The breasts and nipples were squared off, like they’d been built with Legos.
Aesthetics of the Abyss
by Angus Stewart
To seek, use, and elaborate the aesthetic dimension of a text is neither shallow nor inadvisable. Why bother with the truth when the book in your hands is so beautiful? Why join the headlong rush toward a mere imitation of objectivity? The world is always uncooperative, but the aesthetic is yours to play with.
Below, I will engage in such a game.
Items From My Parents
by Lydia G. Fash
Inventory-Items-Rev2.xlsx
7 Deadly Sins Wall sculptures Design Toscano, antique snowshoes, antique washing white ceramic basin & pitcher, wall hanging dream catcher made by Jill, carved cuckoo clock from Switzerland–not working, hardwood benches–2, pottery (made by Lydia?), antique leather football helmet. The spreadsheet of 702 things to give away is getting longer and longer as my parents work through the parts of their house where they have squirreled away items for thirty-three years. Each room becomes a heading for a jumble of the past. Each object awaits a new destination—the retirement apartment, a family member, a thrift store, or the planned auction. Each cell represents something to be claimed—and all of the emotions that go with it.
Diary as Workbench as Archive as Net
by Stephanie Sauer
On Taking Note
There is a diary, which is to say a daily, in which I take note of the goings on in my work. Did I write today? How did it come? Did the words hide away? Did I edit? Was I surprised? Did I discover something new? Did this catalyze delight? Did an ending weave itself in a way I wasn’t expecting? Did I trudge through the hours unrewarded? Did the thing I tried fall flat upon the page? Did it crawl into the waste bin and evaporate? Did I give up early and go for a walk? Did the walk unearth something buried? Did I return to the work afterward?
Ecocatastrophe science fiction was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap. We need more hopeful stories of the future.
by Cat Sparks
A climate-rattled world, ravaged by extreme weather events, is now a popular backdrop for top-shelf fiction. From Booker shortlisted The New Wilderness by Diane Cook to The Coral Bones by EJ Swift, authors are exploring the dramatic possibilities of a post-apocalyptic future. There’s something decadent yet alluring about ruined landscapes littered with once grandiose, now crumbling structures – civilisation’s reset button having been well and truly punched.
Some reckon it’s no better than we deserve, but I’m not one of them.
Steak and Potato
by Marin Kosut
I was born to vegetate. As a juvenile, I’d stare at my blank bedroom wall. I’d stare out at the driveway. Not even the sky or the ceiling. I’d lay on my bed looking down at the middle of my body and stay outside myself inside the house. I wrinkled with time on top of my sheets. Sometimes, admittedly, I flipped through the Pennysaver. I didn’t know nothing, but I wasn’t totally rotten.
Written in the Stars
by Richard Scott Larson
I’m in Red Cloud looking at the stars. Hours after dark, the Nebraska prairie just south of town sweeps out toward faint distant lights marking the horizon below the glittering night sky. The darkness at this late hour seems flattened to the ground and cowering from the enormity of the cosmos, our bodies just shadows to each other as we crane our necks and try to see it all at once: the Milky Way and the Big Dipper looming over the whispering grasses, Cassiopeia on her throne. One shooting star, and then another. Someone finds Venus hanging low in the distance and each of us turns to look as we brace our bodies against a cold wind.