Monique Quintana is a Xicana writer and the author of the novella, Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). She is an Associate Editor at Luna Luna Magazine, Fiction Editor at Five 2 One Magazine, and a pop culture contributor at Clash Books. She has received fellowships from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the Sundress Academy of the Arts, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in Queen Mob's Tea House, Winter Tangerine, Grimoire, Dream Pop, Bordersenses, and Acentos Review, among other publications. You can find her at moniquequintana.com and on Twitter @quintanagothic.
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Image by Ignacio Martinez Egea
A Short Monster-Themed Reading List
**Monique Quintana** is the author of Cenote City(Clash Books, 2019), Associate Editor at Luna Luna Magazine, and Fiction Editor at Five 2 One Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU Fresno and is an alumna of Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her work has appeared in Queen Mobs Teahouse, Winter Tangerine, Dream Pop, Grimoire, and the Acentos Review, among other publications. You can find her at [moniquequintana.com][1]
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Terese Nielsen
Fact and Fiction Are Different Truths
When we hand over the responsibility of discerning the true from the false, we lose our ability to identify it ourselves.
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Hughes Léglise-Bataille
Sometimes Time Cannot Mend All Wounds
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.
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A Triptych of Fictions by Lauren Dostal
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.
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Yume No Ire via The Ardorous
Strawberry Rhubarb Jam
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.
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Daniel Vazquez
Second Goodbye, Non Fiction by Ron Gibson, Jr.
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.
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A Brief History of Your Bathroom Mirror
You start with water. The stream ripples your skin with its current, warps your eyes, leaves you colorless. Water leaves you colorless. Motionless water is better, you discover. A puddle, a lake, a shallow bowl. You obsess over your reflection—the curve of your jaw, the speckles on your cheeks you never knew existed. You sneak glances at yourself in the black pits of someone else’s eyes, the tiny round distortion, the tiny colorless you. These are your first mirrors—the water like a cup of liquid glass, the spheres that sit in your lover’s skull like two black moons.
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Kat Livengood Photography
My Body Dysmorphia
Eventually, I would look at my stomach for another reason. Not to contemplate its size because of my BDD (or Body Dysmorphic Disorder, as a plain-faced therapist would later tell me) but because of something more important. A child, or a baby, or a mass of cells. Something that didn’t make it into the safe spot of life. We spent hardly any time together before the clotting started. Then just as fast as it came, it was gone. In disbelief, I watched the toilet water stained and swirling unsure of what to do with my shame. Eight weeks and I was just another body again. My hand must have hovered over the lever on the toilet for minutes before I could convince myself to let go.
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Evelyn Garcia
Flash Fiction by Valerie Marie Arvidson
Marianna, Yevda, and Nadya are shivering up there in the sky, (like three jewels jittering inside their flying crowns, or coffins, depending on their fate). Marianna is known as the Sapphire because she is blue eyed; Yevda is the Emerald, green eyed, and Nadya is the Ruby (with brown eyes and red hair). Their fairy tale is one of war and of witches, of poverty and prettiness, of lightness and speed, of secret terror and secret victory. Their enemies call them the Nachthexen: night-witches.
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Maren Klemp
On Trying to Understand My Mother's Recent Bipolar Disorder Diagnosis
And suddenly I realized, this is how it is for her. In her eyes, she is always under attack, she always has to fight, and if there isn’t anything to attack she must create it. Maybe she can’t feel strong on her own, there must always be an oppressor, she is the underdog, the caboose.
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Christo Dagorov
My Hospital Stay for Self-Harm
Besides, my new roommate terrifies me. She is prowling throughout the small bedroom like a caged tiger, snarling at the hospital staff and taunting them. I’m convinced that if I so much as glance at her, her attention will shift from the nurse sitting still as a statue outside our door to me, so I stare straight ahead at the wall. Sleepy waves of deep plum and blueish teal swell and curve along the wall and I slump further and further into my thin mattress. My eyes feel heavy; my head feels heavy; I feel heavy. My roommate is throwing her things into the hall, and the nurse sounds like she has finally been coaxed into action. I am light years away, bobbing through the murky fog in my head.
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Trisha Thompson Adams
What It's Like Living With Polio & Breathing in an Iron Lung
There are switches by my hands, little switches that can turn off this, turn on that. A remote control for the television, though I seldom watch it. I prefer the music of Mozart and Bach rather than canned laughter all hours of the day. I prefer nothing canned. Because, that is what I live in. A can. A big, silver bullet of a machine that has kept me alive now for over 60 years.
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Katherine Streeter
Her Mother's Diagnosis
"It’ll make it hard for her to remember a lot of things," he’d said, and so much more. Papa had heard it all, had listened as the doctor used words like aggressive progression and quality of life. Lily had forgotten to listen, had turned instead to the frosted glass plane that separated them from the hall outside, the place where other people were bringing their mamas in too, maybe their papas instead. A brother, a sister, a lover--it didn’t matter here. Walking that long hall toward the doctor’s office was the end of a long journey, a deafening finality.
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Brandi Redd
The Secret Side of Crohn's Disease
She takes her fork and knife and slices into the chicken breast, shredding its skin and meat into pieces, bite-sized, the silvery shining blade into her meal and then, miraculous, the fork delivering food into her mouth that is savory, delicious. Then, halfway through her rapid-fire chewing and swallowing and consumption, the familiar, cloying nausea returns, a twinge that hits Rachel all at once like a gymnast toppling from a balance beam. The chicken transforms from tender to a sickly, vinegarish paste that coats the insides of her throat. Concentrate, Rachel thinks, demanding that the food stay safely contained in her body. I will not. I will not. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
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