The crows started fighting early that morning. Their sawmill-keyed rants from a nearby tree made it impossible to continue sleeping, but I refused to open my eyes. I lie in bed watching as the white letters C-R-O-W-S appeared singly before a sea of black feathers, the opening credits of a scratchy Super 8. In this …
To read this editor’s note, please purchase a copy of issue #13, due out in March 2022.
We started making prank calls some nights after we’d gone out dancing, Lana and me, when we were in between drunk and hyped and couldn’t get to sleep right away. We were too old for it of course but that made it all the more novel. We hadn’t known each other when it was a …
For a handful of years when I was young, I spent two weeks of every summer at my Aunt Maureen’s house in northern Michigan. These visits stopped when I turned thirteen, after I started picking up far too much of what happened between the adults who lived there. Instead, I was packed off to the …
Already for some time, Noah had been watching his wife disappear. She’d once had an impish nose and thick gray hair; now the nose was long and sleek, and while Noah went gray, Penny’s gray was vanishing. She was getting blonder by the day. In the old photos that hung around the house, bursts of …
Business has been shit since the protestors showed up. Every morning for the last month, they’ve met me with bad attitudes and flimsy cardboard signs with slogans like “Smoking: The Other Deadly Sin” and “Un-Holy Smokes!” I feel like I’m part of some anti-tobacco campaign. It’s not like I’m operating an abortion clinic or a …
In my dream last night, my ex-husband had moved back into the first apartment we shared, almost ten years ago. A drafty attic-level one-bedroom. It was unchanged, down to the stains on the floors and the dents in the walls. My ex-husband was standing at the stove cooking something. His hair was falling in his …
First there was a scrabbling sound from the ceiling. Little nails scraping on wood. Ali heard it while she was breast feeding and shuddered. She reached for the phone on the ottoman without disturbing the baby and called her husband. It went straight to voicemail. She texted him: Think we’ve got a critter problem in …
The fat engulfed Mrs. Parathy. It settled around her gold bracelets like a soft brown sludge, bulged out of her sleeves, puffed up around the straps of the expensive, gem-studded slippers she owned by the dozen, made it difficult to walk. Walking was already hard, a slow advance through the overstuffed rooms of her flat, …
The guard opens a dating app during lunch and that’s where he sees the boy. His hair is a shaggy loose curl and his skin is brown like dry soil. He has a tiny scar on his face—a line across his cheekbone. The guard messages him something like, wyd? But what he wants to say …