Issue 1.4, Fall 2016
Featured Content
For this most ghastly horror-themed issue, we did not receive flash or debut submissions, as we usually do. Therefore, we will be featuring two fiction and two poetry pieces.
Fiction: “The Park” by Elaine Atwell
It was one of those days when the run was all Julia lived for. She’d slouched out of bed at nearly eleven and drifted around the house in her pajamas, aimless as a ghost. She began and then abandoned a pile of laundry. She microwaved the same cup of coffee three times. She read, but got no nourishment from it—just filled herself with the internet’s empty outrage, dutifully seeking out both sides of the argument until she was no longer sure who she agreed with. She worked too, but it was only minor edits to a client’s home page and it was over too quickly to feel like it really counted. So mostly she did nothing. (Nothing, Julia found, was like a cloud that looked soft from the outside, but when you put your hand to it was cold and damp and couldn’t support your weight.)
Fiction: “Creeley’s Drop” by Ethan Leonard
It was easy to keep the bottomless pit a
secret. Once a person stood at its edge, there was no way to put it in words. The new
girls on the track team came to me in the locker room, and I saw what they’d seen
reflected in their eyes, so I started talking. I told them about the time I was four and
climbed up of my grandma’s casket to hold her hand one last time. I told them
about the skunk that my brother killed with his pellet gun and buried in the
backyard–how in the mid-July heat, when my father mowed the lawn, the stench of
the body mixed with grass and exhaust. I told them the ways Creeley’s Drop feels
like all of these things, and more, at once. I could almost see the hair on their necks
stand up.
Poetry: “Pain” by Gayane Haroutyunyan
By the time I arrived
it was in the works already.
I never saw the plan,
and the blueprint, he said,
was at the engineer’s office
speaking its mind,
perfecting itself,
drinking Colombian coffee.
Featured Poetry: Two Poems by Robert Hamilton
“Like Bedtime Stories With Klaus Kinski”
Remind me there are skeletons
everywhere, walking, running,
only of course we never see them.
It bothered me once
that I will never see my own
& it still does, sometimes. Another’s,
yes, but not this second self
grinning gauntly, the femur line
or a gnarled tibia hinting at some
obscurely calcified tale. Child,
it will never get better than this.
Are you warm under the covers?
Featured Art: “Serpent Limbs” by Denny E. Marshall
