Kaleidoscope
by Lizzie Lawson
The jar was full of souls. Charlotte didn’t believe Jaci at first, but when Jaci revealed the glass container over the dandelion grass in her backyard, Charlotte could see for herself. Still in their navy jumpers after school, the girls huddled close as Jaci unscrewed the lid. Charlotte could see wispy bubbles swimming in the glass, iridescent and slippery.
Pride of Rotterdam
by Tom Harvey
The September wind skidded off the high tide into his face. Doug marched along the sand. He gave Hippy Saxophone Woman a quick wave, forcing his hands into his pockets, hoping to pass her before she called him a ‘fine fellow’ and asked how his mum was doing, or noticed he was wearing the same mashed-up clothes he’d worn all week and that he should be in school. She gave them a tin of Quality Street chocolates last Christmas; he kept the empty tin for storing precious things he found on the beach. So far, it just contained a little, orange, plastic horse.
Winterfresh
by Kent Kosack
I quit chewing gum in eighth grade. It was spring and we were all nervous and excited for graduation and summer and high school and somehow that energy gave me the courage to approach Joey Talbot on his perch at the top of the bleachers as he watched the cheerleaders practice on the soccer field still damp from the morning rain. He’d broken up with Sara, our grade’s It girl, and I swear I’d seen him checking me out in the hallways. I could feel his eyes on me in social studies in third period while Mr. Jackson rambled on about the Great Depression. Only I wasn’t depressed. I was ecstatic, at first. Greatly. Until a month passed and he still hadn’t asked me out and the ecstasy turned into a dull thrum of anxiety and doubt and expectation. When would he ask me out? Where? How? Finally, I spotted him on the bleachers, alone, and I just went for it. I shoved three sticks of Winterfresh in my mouth and kept repeating the name like a mantra, Winterfresh, Winterfresh, trying to feel as cool and crisp as the gum as I creaked up the bleachers.
Stupid Girls
by Adeola Adeniyi
“You must smoke crack if you think we’d be dumb enough to ride with y’all,” Charlotte told Harold Briggs while standing near the closed Nevins Street subway as he sat behind the wheel of his dark blue Nissan Maxima. She already watched her friend Courtney go sit in the backseat the second after he pulled over five minutes ago and offered them a ride. At least her other friend Chanel stood beside her. Courtney ignored Charlotte when she knocked on the back window and ordered her to leave right now. The young dude with long blond dreadlocks riding shotgun told Charlotte and Chanel they’ll freeze to death if she didn’t take up the offer. Charlotte had seen the shotgun rider a few times before in the kitchen at the newly built art studio on Nevins and Livingston called In Craze where they just left from, but her, Chanel, and Courtney never talked to him before. To Charlotte, he looked like he went to high school during the Reagan years with his full beard and graying chin. The three almost seventeen-year-old girls would have already been riding the 3 train if all the MTA workers hadn’t gone on strike this afternoon and now they had to shiver in the cold with snow dropping from the cloudy sky to be with the four inches already on the ground.
Heorot Hall
by Sara Cappell Thomason
In the final year of our marriage, I was prone to starting conversations with Kelly on topics he knew nothing about. Usually, it was something I had just read in The New Yorker. I’d bring up the artist Ai Weiwei for instance, his precarious status as a Chinese dissident, and when Kelly just nodded, said interesting, but had nothing to add, I would sigh, sometimes even act exasperated, as if I was basically all alone on Earth because he could not keep up with high culture. In reality, he was getting up every day at 5am to go to the gym before heading to the office, while I slept in and hung out at Starbucks.
El-Rokba
by J.P. Apruzzese
for Nahla
“What will you look like when you turn thirty?” baba says. He’s sitting at the table, his face turned toward a plate of ful medames and a steaming glass of black tea. A narrow white beard dips along his angular jawline toward a rigid under-bite. Determined to exit the apartment before he spots her lipstick, Rasha says nothing. But at the door she notices him shaking his head. “You’re lying to yourself, Rasha.”
Sky Lobby to Big Bubble in Under Five Minutes
by Jason Brandt Schaefer
David O’Corley did it, so we had to beat him. Ain’t nobody thought it could be done, but he had the pics on his phone to prove it. There it was, his finger on the red button, them digital numbers on his Timex just under the five-minute mark. He even took a screenshot so you could see the time at the top of his iPhone. He’s got a matching one from Sky Lobby before he made the run, and the math worked, but some folks still didn’t believe him. They said he just camped out and let his watch run or took the pics on different days. But they’re all idiots and they know better.
An Early History Of The Three-Faced Race
by Aug Stone
Local flâneurs Puffy Pullman and Cheeks Redborne lay in the grass under the cool shade of the oak trees as the afternoon reached 3PM on the 1972 Summer Solstice and the festivities of the Harrisonburg Summer Fair showed no signs of abating. They had been drinking red wine since the cock crowed the morning, for while they never participated in the town’s activities, they relished the Fair as an excuse for making merry, believing their witty commentary on all things Harrisonburg to reach its peak just as year reached its own. They were quite drunk by now, their long moustaches stained various shades of burgundy from the myriad bottles scattered about their feet. While they took pride in their appearance, for both were well-dressed in floral pattern collared shirts under dark suit jackets with matching custom leather shoes, even donning capes for this most special event, the same care could not be said of their physiques. Their already far from athletic builds were running to mush, exacerbated by the switch to the legal side of being able to purchase alcohol, both having turned 18 the previous autumn. This they did plenty of, believing themselves, in some respects correctly, to be bon vivants, and now that the weather was more copacetic they relished relishing the good life out situated in it. Cheeks was letting loose a torrent of guffaws at the proceedings on the field while Puffy had his face buried in the crook of his arm, giving him, had it not been for the presence of the Sun, a most vampire-like appearance, having had to avert his eyes due to an overdose of hilarity some moments before. The two were watching the annual three-legged race.