The Tao of Sharkey
by Eric Williams
Among the staff, Sharkey was somewhat of a folk hero. He was the only person that seemed to be able to do it right, work at the restaurant without any side effects, without needing to abuse something or someone, without, it seemed, a care in the world. He was a talented street photographer and would ride his bike around all day taking photos on his medium-format film camera, and at night, he tended bar.
Ladies We Are Floating in Space
by Hannah Gregory
Michael & Olivia
When the realtor brought us into the living room, we couldn’t help but notice the hole in the floor, roped off by orange traffic cones and yellow caution tape. There was also this… not sure about the best way to describe it… a blood-curdling scream coming from the hole? Which—if we’re being honest here—we both found a little distracting. The realtor pointed out the old push-button light switch, turning a fixtureless light bulb hanging naked from the ceiling on-and-off, on-and-off, just to prove to us that it worked and added to the charm of the whole place. We asked him what’s with the hole in the floor, the screams rattling in our heads, beginning to feel like they were our own screams, twisting and breaking us over-and-over for eternity. He waved his arm over the hole and was like, Oh, that thing? We leaned our heads over the tape and saw that the hole continued into the basement. In the basement, there was a deeper hole that was… well, it looked like someone dropped a bucket of Hole Paint on the concrete floor, but it also looked like the hole just kept falling into infinite, you know, hole-ness.
Hotline Bling
by Shya Scanlon
Paul couldn’t remember whether The Idea had come to him as a result of reading The Suffering of Young Werther, or whether he’d been driven back to that book because of The Idea. In the end, he thought, it wouldn’t really matter. Once The Idea had settled in, everything else seemed to bend toward it, not so much causally as aesthetically, like a flame bends toward a finger. Anyway, Paul wasn’t alone. Death was trending, death of any kind, as was talk of the so-called fourth wave whose symptoms would not be physical. The Twitter account @normalade had made The Idea its whole brand by keeping alive a running question: would the posts suddenly stop? But this sad person’s frank openness made Paul doubt normalade’s family had much to worry about. If you were serious you shut the fuck up.
Sing a New Song
by Kurt Baumeister
Once upon a time, in the 1980’s, in America…
1.
“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
― Jerry Falwell
There was Mayor Randolph on the television saying how the American Dream was freedom of religion and this right couldn’t be denied, nor would it be a safe America or a safe world or a safe anything until any, any, religion was allowed a place to congregate and hold services and the like, said safe place to be furnished solely at the taxpayer’s expense. And it was okay when the Catholics showed up, even the Shintoists and the Buddhists, they were alright; but when the Third Church of Satan moved in next door, that was when all the trouble started.
Eric’s Evening
by Emma Horwitz
Eric, shoving his cock in and out of the hot cantaloupe he’d sent for a spin in the microwave, took a pause. Someone had just broken into his apartment. This was particularly ill-timed, as Eric had spent the better part of the afternoon getting it up and hard in the first place, jacking himself to hell and back alone in the early morning elevator car, teasing at the sliding skin of his shaft with a rogue hand as he rearranged the tuck of his shirt at work, pinching a nipple on the subway ride home from the grocery store where this particular melon had been selected. He had wanted to tell someone while in transit of the hardening underneath his pants’ zipper, proud of the day’s accomplishment. But, looking around the crowded car, he wasn’t sure who to share himself or his successes with, and so he decided instead to stare at his cantaloupe swaying in its plastic bag, knocking into the knee of another man, traveling with his own items, standing in his own pants, a cock of his own that Eric would likely not see, though not for lack of imagination.
Big Bike Man
by Stephen A. Geller
Harry’s office door is closed when he’s talking to a patient. If it’s slightly ajar, he’s at his desk, music in the background, reading medical journals or writing a scientific paper.
Today, Harry was standing at the window, just staring out.
Brandy Fucking Melville
by Amy Zimmerman
It was the summer Lana Del Rey insisted she didn’t glamorize abuse, that she was just a glamorous person who wrote a lot about her abusive relationships. Kerry didn’t like Lana as much as people probably thought she did, but she acknowledged that they were kindred spirits: poets who didn’t write poetry, witches who couldn’t cast spells, white girls who saw heterosexuality for everything it was—passé, violent, exhausting, elective—and did it anyway.
The Chorus
by Amelia Beckerman
A week in, it feels like the bugs have always been here. Dad, always quick on the uptake, wastes no time outfitting the house and cars in cicada-resistant armor. The windows and screens are all checked, locked, taped down. He finds a mosquito net, from a mission trip Charlie took during his Jesus-phase, and builds a fort around the front door. When you want to go outside, which I do not, you first have to get goggles and an old auction paddle from the mudroom and follow a carefully choreographed routine that involves opening the door a sliver, sticking your arm through the hole, and waving the paddle around like the only remaining painting of your great-great-grandfather has just been placed on the auction block.