Mary isn’t a great internet name. When she introduces herself to someone new, she always assumes they’re picturing the lady who birthed the baby Jesus or a different Mary washing Jesus’ feet or a pious and forgettable woman circa 1610 or 1743 or 1872. She wears muslin skirts and a mop cap and goes about […]
Fiction
Transcriptions
Baba Yaga and the Bird
by Sophie Panzer
Baba Yaga lives deep in the Hudson Valley in a house on chicken legs. She studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design back in the ’50s and transformed the stilts holding the home up over her backyard pond. Her lot is surrounded by an ancient fence studded with bleached skulls—deer and squirrel bones […]
Caterpillar by Dragana Mokan
translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox
Agnica was sitting in a pink room that smelled sweet. Mama had sent her to the neighbors to get a bouquet. She accepted a plate of cake from Miss Jovanka.
Saoirse
by Peter Gordon
Can you imagine naming a girl freedom? he asks me. Can you even know what that would do to her brain, starting when she was a baby, being someone who gets to go through life doing whatever the fuck she wants?
An Account of Vertebrates
by Mandira Pattnaik
In the event of being just matured, we could be jellyfish — pliable, buoyant, floral.
Sons
by Bodie Fox
A drop of water splashes on her face when I lift my foot, silt clinging to my sole. She gently cradles my heel in her hand as she wets a corner of the rag. A school of tadpoles swim by. A crooked grin breaks over his teeth. The rag tickles, but my stomach curls. Sons and I don’t look at each other while she works between my toes.
This is the part
by Francine Witte
where I believe that it was the goddamn fault of the night willow, that if it hadn’t been so blacked out like it was, bowed so brushy and low, you could have seen your way around it. Could have driven a clean road home like you do every night, except this one.
Parable of the Mother
by Lane Chasek
Her gift, which she discovered when she was sixteen, consists of looking at these pieces of garbage and watching them take the shape of a human being.
Awkward Little Creatures that Flail About, 1956
by John Brantingham
it’s early June twilight, the bats just now coming out and they stand awkwardly on the gravel of the driveway, crunching it back staring up at the little creatures that flail about until Henry asks Clyde what he wants, which is natural enough but said in a little punk tone that Clyde wants to slap out of his mouth
“Your Eyes In the Darkness”
A Review of Rick White’s Talking to Ghosts at Parties
by Chase Erwin
White drags the reader, as if by the collar, through moments in time and space that reflect and refract each other, both literally and thematically.
