By Bill Merklee
Months after the accident, we’re clearing out your house. It’s a daunting task for such a small place. Books everywhere. Endless vinyl but no turntable. Shelves of souvenirs from the same places as the stickers on the back of your charred and crumpled Jetta.
By Kelli Short Borges
Mandy says she’s queen of seventh grade and we’re her workers and she “ha ha ha’s,” but her eyes flash venom and it’s annoying because Mandy’s the new girl and already thinks she’s royalty but she’s so pretty that we whirr around her…
By Thomas O’Connell
It is the raft that you inflated for our daughter to float upon, drifting around the clubhouse pool. The raft is the last place where your breath remains.
By Len Kuntz
We were trailer park kids who stole things. Middling shit. Squirt guns. Bazooka Joe. Saltwater taffy. Licorice. Playboy magazine. Gordie was always sore. His dad tooled belts. Used them on Gordie. Buckle end to the back and shoulders. My dad was still doing years in Walla Walla. DWI. Vehicular Homicide.
By Richard Stimac
Willa’s older brother set a blanket out in the backyard. His name was William, but people called him Billy. Willa’s full name was Willamina.
By Diane Payne
You waken to the sound of an owl hooting, two cats screeching, and the sound of humans crying, their grief whirling into the eternity of nocturnal voices reaching out…
By Mikki Aronoff
She cuts the engine and swings down from the cab like a spider monkey flying through rainforest. She thrives on heights, but she’s running out of diesel and there’s that hot date with a trapezist seven exits away.
By Mikki Aronoff
The wind blew and the door splintered. She squeezed you out fresh as a lemon, just in time for Jeopardy. The only time they took your picture, it was a cold day in December.
By Mikki Aronoff
At dusk on the last day of second grade, we stopped doing wheelies in the empty lot down the street to watch Mathilde, rigid on the sidewalk as her mother shoved a suitcase into the trunk of someone’s car. Her mother never turned around. Never waved goodbye.
By Victoria Ballesteros
“In dreams, I glide past borders and through concrete doors to reach places I have never left. I fly over green picket fences and bougainvillea trees adorned with slivers of the past.”
By Meg Pokrass
At the Japanese lantern festival, the Spinster and I hip-bump in, psyched about whatever people think of us, two zaps of purple in life’s crazy shuffle, licking wasabi from our lips, ignoring each other’s hair, unpedicured or manicured, candid about our hard-earned frumpiness.