Possibly Goldenmouth
by Andrew Farkas
“There will be no explanations.”
That’s what the Villain might have said, when the corpse of the Superspy lay sprawled out before him. That’s what he might have said, if he spoke at all.
But he doesn’t speak. Ever.
In February
by Meg Yardley
February is the worst month of the year for teachers.
In February, Avery Williams knows with absolute certainty that her students are ungrateful, entitled, hormonal monsters whose attention spans have been atrophied by their screen addictions, who are learning nothing from her class, and who will go on to lead miserable lives with no genuine human connection and no ability to think for themselves.
In February she calculates her salary for all the possible retirement timelines (it should be in five years, but with the budget cuts…).
Girl Scout
by Elise Jeanmaire
Evie matched with Brad. His face was skinny, softly bearded, and kind. There was no brooding, flexing, signs of a fraught relationship with masculinity. Brad’s hair was perfectly coiffed, like a soft wave, poised to deliver a surfer back to the beach safely. In every photo, no matter what, his hair remained perfectly shaped. On top of a mountain, coiffed. Playing frisbee with his friends, coiffed. Attending a work conference, coiffed. At the barbershop, dazzlingly coiffed. What kind of miracle hair product was he using? Evie needed answers! The last picture she scanned was of Brad on a beach with his shirt off. His body was solid and hairless, which was nice because she wasn’t sure if she was ready to handle body hair. She wasn’t even sure she was ready for a man.
Inheriting It
by Garrett Crowe
I have to call an 800 number cause my father’s oxygen machine starts buzzing. Lights go red. The whole alert. My father tells me he thinks the machine has “blown a rod.” He’s just breathing tube-air. Turns out, the machine’s been acting this way for weeks. My stepmom hasn’t done a thing except power the machine off, then power it back on, she’s fighting her own cancer, has her own cigs to smoke. My brother is nowhere to be found. And my father assures me he’s breathing just fine, even when his oxygen machine whines in a high-pitched frequency. I eventually track down a service.
For a Pint of Plum Liquor
by Arjun Razdan
In puffs the kettle on the old oven sends the smoke. Pictures of elders have moist frames from the heat generated in the room. He sits at his desk, trembling hands, hands trembling from having drunk a little bit too much of his cherry brandy yesterday. Outside, the apple tree has shed its foliage. The pear tree is nearly bare rising into the cadre of the window, piercing it. Beyond, you see the bare mountains now almost brown from the gone sheen of the sun and a year past. He looks at his mother in one of the photos, sheepskin coat and turning over the beads, and then he looks down on the desk in front of him, at the square pocket of brown paper that is the postcard. He lifts it from his desk, takes a stamp and puts his saliva to the back of the tampon, before
The Screaming Boat
by Alexandra Dos Santos
Screams went by like a smear in the night. They coasted the East River, that green mirror reflecting skyscrapers that looked like hanged corpses in the water. Scruff sat on the Astoria Park rocks alone, as she always was, watching the machines churn up waves. She’d sit and watch water taxis shuttle quiet shadows after dark, and booze cruise flash LED lights to a steady dance bass. But Scruff never heard a boat scream before, especially from a boat this far away. It drew closer and louder. It wasn’t the roar of a rowdy party; their voices twisted backwards and sideways, locking together into a writhing behemoth. Scruff could almost see it before her eyes—that sound made manifest. But then it went away, and she just saw the boat. In front of her, finally clear, she recognized it.
A Big Old Pit of Fire
by Matt Rowan
I think it had been that way for as long as I could remember. There’d been the sweltering heat of my birth, expelled into a world of vapors and vitiation, always with the sense that someone’s warm breath was on my neck.
It’d been getting hotter and hotter for as long as anyone could remember, on account of the fires that circled the entire country. They acted as a kind of barrier, too, but it was not fun having to deal with their heat, let me also say.
Catharsis
by Daniel Seifert
“That hurts,” whined the old man as she brushed his thick white hair.
She sighed and stroked it through the wisps even more gently.
Still he complained. “Too hard. Too loud. Too fast.”