How to Write About Stillness
by John Miguel Shakespear
First: wake up, check your socials, and hit snooze. Wake up again ten minutes later; hit snooze again. Now haul yourself out of bed. You better stretch, bucko. Today’s the day you’re going to write an essay about stillness.
Look, it’s right there in your Google calendar: “Consider benefits of stillness and introspection, September 4, 8 a.m.-5p.m.”
It’s 8:37 a.m. Already behind.
Cape Cod Grandpa 1968
by Alice Kaltman
He can be Grandpa. I need a grandpa.
A horseshoe crab that has seen things, done things. Still living a long horseshoe crabby life. Ginormous. Crusty with barnacles and tiny mussels. Experienced. I already have a whole slew of his dead relatives lined up in size order outside the crappy shack my human family has rented for two weeks. Mother Crab, Father Crab, Big Kid Crab, Middle Kid Crab, Little Kid Crab. My Horseshoe Crab Family. They smell like rancid salted putrid dry cracked brittleness, but my human parents support my ten year old imagination, or maybe they’re just fed up with me, their dreamy son, so they let the mini-monsters lay there, baking in the sun on the splintery deck, stinking up our beach vacation.
Toxicity Report
by Vic Sizemore
Two years after Oxy shut down Mom’s lungs forever, my stepdad Cecil called and asked if I would come and care for him while the coalmine finished killing him off. He’d managed to avoid suffocation down in Patriot Coal’s number seven, but the coal had collected slowly, a breath at a time, like silt in a creek bed. Now it was smothering him from inside. I knew he was bad off because all the pride he’d had to swallow to make the call, to speak up when he heard my voice say hello; we’d had our differences, almost come to blows more than once.
Frog
by K. W. Holland
As far as frogs go, it’s pretty big. Like the size of my fist if I used it to punch a brick wall. Swollen.
“Jimmy?” it croaks. Jimmy is my name. It wants me to pick it up. “Jimmy?”
From its mouth, my name sounds like something bubbling out of a swamp.
Reasons to Admit
by Gabrielle Griffis
Iris had a sixth sense. She could read other peoples’ thoughts, so she never went out in public. She spent her days in the garden, cutting flowers, gathering herbs.
Her father was an architect. He built asylums, traveling the East Coast, overseeing the construction of brick institutions.
She was fixated on irrevocable spite. Her mind stuck in loops of disdain. Judgments hurled at her existed under the surface of everything. Unkind thoughts were like insufferable wounds.
Pink Containers
by Laura Freudig
The squirrel in the parking lot eyed the peanuts I was throwing with a thin thread of thought more like a rat’s wormish tail than its own generous bushy one: a narrow line stretching from the woods to the loading dock, from fear to desire. I stacked two pound bags of peanuts from a pallet by the open loading door into a metal cart, which I planned to wheel into the Food Mart and place on a shelf in the strategic location devised by our manager, Ms. Carmine Bardwell. One of the stiff plastic sacks had split, spilling its contents among the rest of the sacks, and as I stacked, I simultaneously tossed peanuts to the squirrel. In the past ten minutes it had skittered down a spruce tree and a concrete retaining wall, across thirty feet of cracked asphalt and was now ten feet from the loading dock.
A Slant of Light
by Abby Manzella
The afternoon sun creeps stealthily onto Dolores’s desk—an ephemeral cat. Its low, reserved angle brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain slant of light…” She recites it as she rests her pen, her voice breaking the stillness.
It has already been a long winter. She is tired of sweaters. She is exhausted by seeing her breath materialized like the ghost she feels herself to be.
American Paint
by Olivia Walton
I probably told you, but two years ago I got us a real nice horse, a mare with a blonde mane and shot-straight back who I called Ethel after Sallie’s mother’s mother. Ethel was only fourteen hands high so she was a good ride for Sallie, just a waif of a thing, but was still big enough that I could take her to and from the river each day, and into town when we ran low on condensed milk and potatoes and Sallie’s woman-type things. Point is, Sallie loved that horse like it was a lapdog, always braiding its hair and slipping it bits of orange, even when I was between jobs. Sometimes I’d kid her, remind her we weren’t supposed to have any Gods before our God, but she’d just laugh and tell me that as long as dinner was still on the table when it was supposed to be I had nothing to worry about, so I didn’t.