On the Friend of My Life

January 26, 2018

Part of growing up with someone is learning how to grow apart too. When we started high school we drifted a little. Our senior year we had anatomy together and became friends again. We spent every morning together in the commons area eating breakfast. Our friend, Emily, dubbed us "The Breakfast Club" and decided which characters from the film we were. The night we graduated we all rode together to the local movie theater still in our graduation regalia and we watched back to back movies before going home. My own family had pizza and gathered together, but we went out together instead. I still think about it a lot: the way friends become family.

Sometimes Time Cannot Mend All Wounds

December 28, 2017

Even though she was certain she had drunken too much the night before, she still slid into her car, waiting briefly before turning the key and pulling out of the driveway. She drove with such caution, at least fifteen kilometers below the speed limit and triple checking every turn, sign and light. No one else had her caution, the world was so impatient that it wouldn’t wait for her. She had been left behind.

Creative Non-Fiction by Umang Kalra

December 22, 2017

Paris was blue – tired, sleepy dawn mushed into
slow sunset folded over a city that is laying itself open yet
hiding every part of it under bricks and light.

Ma Says Monsters are Real

December 14, 2017

I’m still so afraid of all the monsters that I never want anyone to know or even know about, that no one should ever have to know at all.

Do This in Remembrance of Me

December 13, 2017

My mother says that she feels the presence of my aunt a lot. Something in the way the curtains move and shake when the wind blows makes my mother feel her there. I’ve never experienced that. A month ago, however, I experienced something else. I had dreams about her often after she died. In the beginning, it felt kind of her to show up like that. Despite the experience of watching her die and then seeing her body leave, I never had nightmares. It was always dreams about her talking to me and being confused over my crying. Even in my dreams I would cry because I was aware of it being a dream.

Biathanatos by Nicola Maye Goldberg

December 1, 2017

I know what it sounds like, but it’s true: you broke the spine of my life. You used to hand me scraps of kindness, and I would gnaw on them for days.

A Triptych of Fictions by Lauren Dostal

November 13, 2017

Buried under the snow, a hand. It crawled with fingertips as black as the hidden pavement. The man arising. The sun glaring on his home in the snow, turning it back into water. A car and then a crowd pass by and the man sits naked with his hand outstretched. Scars spiral up the muscles of his blue veined forearm--a tale he’d rather not tell and no one asks him anyway. There was a woman once, passing by she dropped a red kopeck in his hand and he thanked her. Such a strange piercing stare in her ice blue eyes bloodshot with last night’s memories still playing like a video tape across her retinas. Was he there? No, he was buried deep where no one could find him, and now his house was gone. He’d make another when the weather turned. Until then, he would sit with his hand outstretched and waiting. Maybe someone would take it.

Flash Fiction by Lauren Dostal

November 9, 2017

Can he see? Can he see this helpless thing that I have become? I lay my arm on the table between us. I know what he wants. Not amputation but extraction. The table is cold. My arm burns hot where it swells under the light. Silently he leans forward, feeling, prodding. I scream with pain. "Oh God!" I have forgotten. The blade flashes in the light as it plunges deep into my skin. Shocked white, the walls raise up from inside my flesh. Droplets mark the paths of capillaries where they flow into the well he has created. He is searching for it. His grey bristle eyebrows cast a shadow over the pits of his eyes and I see through to his skull, to the bones we all share. I feel him tugging. Then just like a knife slicing through soft butter, it slides out. He holds it glinting in the light. A razor blade, the tiny letters etched upon its side read "drink me". He casts it back into a jar, and when I raise my eyes I see a thousand more lining the wall, filled to overflowing with extracted pasts. I meet his stare, and for once he smiles.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jam

October 26, 2017

Because Pauline? She was dead. And it couldn’t have been her daughter because she had stopped by the day before she left and dropped off the secret recipe to Pauline’s strawberry rhubarb jam. That jam had been our family’s favorite for years, but until now, the only way we could have any was when she brought it to us in the summertime herself.

'Through Foxglove Nebula' - acrylic on board, 2016, by F. E. Clark

Purpurea, a Flash Fiction by F. E. Clark

October 25, 2017

The second time she drifted in magenta her blood flowed dark and the purple-blue mist rose before her eyes. It was then, there on the ground beneath him, grit grinding into her shoulder blades, that she remembered that the magenta have visited her once before.

via John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

A Daughter of Hemingway

September 6, 2017

My mother once told me that young girls who live without their fathers always seek a father. First we seek our real father, sometimes we seek our spiritual father second, but always we search for a father. I have learned that you cannot pin the word father to a man’s jacket and expect him to remember to answer to the title or even to wear the jacket. Uncles and grandfathers have stood in line for me to pin a title to and all have failed. So why not pin the title to a man I never met? One I’ll never meet.

On Fortune Telling

August 28, 2017

When I was little someone told me that only the devil could tell the future. Anyone who claimed to be a fortuneteller, anyone who seemed to know things before they happened, were that of the devil. I wondered if I would go to hell because I always knew things before they actually happened. My mother said that she didn’t know of such a verse and she said I was just lucky: She said I had a lucky "gift" of knowing possibilities and knowing truths before they materialized. It never felt lucky: it felt like rocks in the pit of my stomach dragging me closer to hellfire. I could ask myself is this really going to happen? And I would always know the answer. I felt guilty for having the gift of knowing.

Second Goodbye, Non Fiction by Ron Gibson, Jr.

August 23, 2017

With other emergency room patients watching, I retched, filling and overfilling the tray. A janitor was sent for to mop up around my feet. The nurse brought over two trays this time, but it was the same story: I retched, filled, then overfilled them. The nurse and the janitor's body language seemed to indicate (at least to me) they were growing increasingly alarmed at the volume I was spewing.

How to Be a Duplicitous Woman

August 17, 2017

Wake up one morning and see yourself, really see yourself in a mirror, in a window, in the blackened television screen.

Photograph by Mary Ann ThomasDescription: On one flight in the spring, I visited Denver for only a few days. — Photograph by Mary Ann Thomas
Description: On one flight in the spring, I visited Denver for only a few days.

Non Fiction By Mary Ann Thomas: Today, I Fly

August 8, 2017

I started to hate flying. It took me a few years to say those words out loud, but when I did, I started to believe them. I hate flying, I thought, and I became someone who hated flying. The girl in me who always took the window seat and who gazed outwards at cloud textures and Lego cities, who loved the pull of her body against the seat back on take-off, and who always talked to the stranger next to her, was gone. In her place was a woman who said, I hate flying, and couldn’t explain why.