Wishbone
by Kim Magowan
CALL ME, Aria had texted, all caps. Greg saw the text when he turned on and then immediately pocketed his phone. He and his partner Franny were in a taxi, winding snakily from the airport.
Franny had forgotten to pack her sunglasses, an omission she realized only when they landed in blinding Phuket. Greg waited for her to go to the hotel lobby to buy a new pair before sitting on the bed with its gold linen cover and pulling out his cell phone.
Family Photos
by Adam Voith
“Look, we can’t do anything. We see what happens in the room, but we can’t move. We can’t intervene. And they can’t hear us. Believe me, we’ve tried everything. Also, don’t forget: I’m 24-Year-Old Whitney. I don’t know him like this.” Whitney is smiling in her wedding dress, happy with the choice she’s made. “I can’t speak for Right Now Whitney. We’re not sure if she’s aware.”
Yassa Martin & Me
by Kyra Baldwin
Should the story have pictures? Well, it’d be better if it did. I could give you the one of her at the Met Gala, wearing a bright pink tutu and a Guy Fawkes mask. The theme was The Internet; she had bangles made of old Dell keyboards that slid down to her elbows and bunched like tourniquets. If you look past her, you can just see my shoulder and a bit of my beard in the top corner.
the summer I refused to shower
by Isobel Atacus
I wake up with a desire to email you. I splash my face with water, cold, sharp, then pick up the bags of recycling to take along to the bins in the local praça.
I walk slowly, as if to feel the whole day ahead.
The Greatest Show on Earth
by James A. Reeves
There’s this old couple that gets around. Maybe you’ve seen them. They’ve been touring the country for years, long before America elected a game show host for president. They started off doing decent business at casinos and conventions until their tantrums began causing problems. At a fundraiser in Houston, they raised the house lights and singled out members of the audience, including the Secretary of Defense, saying they refused to perform for “a bunch of pornographic machine-gunning murderers.” Although this earned the couple some stock with the underground scene, the punk rockers and break-dancers didn’t know what to make of their mambo routines or their clumsy impressions of Hubert Humphrey and Dorothy Parker. Soon they were kicked down to the county fair circuit where they drank all the booze, spiked the acrobats’ water with a particularly vivid hallucinogenic called Black Sunshine, and set enough tents on fire while cuddling with cigarettes that even the sideshows along Interstate 10 wouldn’t have anything to do with them. So they began hitching from city to city, busking on street corners and subway platforms and that’s probably where you’ve seen them.
Fondue
by Martin Castro
When she returns, Georgia will sit on her suitcase in the living room and inhale as if testing her memory of the air inside the house, chewing on it, mapping it out. That is how it begins. I will offer to help her unpack but she’ll brush the suggestion aside and, after dinner, she will begin to tell me finally of the week she spent abroad.
My Father’s Death
by Tita Chico
I begin my summer vacation on the morning of Father’s Day. I am with my partner and his children.
My father—my difficult, strange, passion-filled father—has been dead for five months.
The Blanket
by Anthony Varallo
I don’t remember much about the blanket. It was one of those handmade kinds you sometimes see in older people’s homes, slung atop the back of a sofa, or folded at the foot of a bed. It was blue and gold, possibly fringed. Patterns might have played a role. Or not. Like I said, I don’t remember much about it. If you were looking at a photograph of the blanket right now and asking me questions about it, you would probably conclude that I hardly remembered anything at all about the blanket. And you’d be a little bit right. But you’d also be a little bit wrong, too.