Methods of Transport by Sarah Van Bonn Car. A car is a privacy that stacks itself upon the privacies of others like blocks, like the wooden blocks of that endless tower game—you know the one. The tower isn’t endless, but it also never really ends, even after it falls; that is the point of the game. My childhood was car-based. It had to be. I was born near where the car was invented. If not the physical object of […]
Our Version of Sweatheart
Our Version of Sweatheart by Andrew Bomback A sheep dog greeted us when we arrived at the first farm, and Juno immediately roped the dog into a game of fetch using a pine cone. Xenia and I brought our bags and food inside, and I set up Mateo’s portable crib while she nursed him. It was nearing his bedtime, so while Xenia put Mateo to sleep, I took Juno for a walk around the farm to scope out the animals. […]
Caricatures
Caricatures by Nate Waggoner “I ate all your marshmallow fluffernutter. Put it in your memoirs.” -Jai Waggoner I’ve just moved across the country to Berkeley, California to attend a post-graduate creative writing program at San Francisco State University. I live with my aunt Jai, who is an art teacher and assistant principal at Malcolm X Elementary. In Jai’s art classroom, eighteen little buddies watercolor at four tables. Ephemera covers every inch of the room’s walls: kachinas, Dia de los Muertos […]
Suit
Suit by Daniel Bowman Jr It’s Valentine’s Day. Sub-zero winds blow snow across the stubble of Indiana cornfields. We hunker down for a weekend of books and movies, blankets and tea. I make a checklist of chores. It includes dropping off my suit coats at the dry cleaner. I own just a few and they aren’t much to look at, but I wear one to work, with jeans, most every day.
Dress Up
Dress Up by Angela Brussel Your hairs fell with great, thunderous thuds to the floor, the volume of their import far exceeding the barely audible sound they actually emitted, and you smiled. I watched the bunches gather, the heaviness of our history in them, by my feet like little carcasses, the linoleum a mottle of brown and regret, and I grew flush with despair. It took everything in me to not bend my knees and forage for every last wisp.
The Great Love Ambush
The Great Love Ambush by Vanessa Blakeslee By thirty-five I had figured out two things about myself for sure—that I am the type of person, bluntly honest and eccentric, who requires getting to know slowly, over months, before a romance has any chance of succeeding, and secondly, that I needed to stop chasing, stop obsessing, stop pining after the clever, charismatic men with whom I’d always felt instant sparks. The latest had been an impressionable debut novelist I’d met at […]
Places
Places by Stephen Green I didn’t know what the feeling was, but as I stared up at a man in the bucket of a bucket truck taking the sign down letter by letter – P A T H M A R K – I felt something. How were they held up there, I wondered. Even as I watched I couldn’t figure it out. They would be gone and there would be just a wall. But as the bucket lowered, I […]
Memory Palace
Memory Palace by Ashley P. Taylor Note: All names have been changed. “What’s your necklace?” people often ask me, along with where I’m from and do I have any siblings. It so happens that the gold pendant is where I’m from: Mount Desert Island, Maine (specifically, Bar Harbor). My mom and I each have an island pendant. We got them some time before we moved away, to Kentucky, but I only started wearing mine once I’d left. That was half […]