Category: Fiction
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Assisted Living
I couldn’t help believing my mom was dragging me down. I felt like a bad person, thinking a thing like that, but I’d spent the last year bringing her clean underwear in psych wards and convalescent hospitals. She was still young, everyone said. And physically fine. But she wanted to die. It had become my…
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Elysian Fields
I wake in morning light on my back-porch cot, glad to figure I’ve found my way back in the night, thanking Providence and Zeus and whoever else. In the night I must’ve dreamed about Helen, the older sister of Parke Wright and the only woman I’ve ever truly loved. I’ve got her song on my…
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The Best Light Fades
At Mom’s Place I wore a nametag that said Angel and waited on a group of teenagers. They poured ketchup, mustard, mayo, and watery Coke, into a glass and dared one another to drink it. A couple of guys from the Navy Yard showed up for midnight milkshakes, my landlord among them. He was happy…
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Princess Manor
It felt like a violation to be in Princess Manor alone. It felt like a violation to be a woman there at all, wearing floppy jeans and a wrinkled sweater. Men looked at me as I walked to a booth at the rear, then averted their eyes, like I was a living person in the…
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Sex Tips For The End Of The World
Fiction by Nicole Beckley For a moment she thinks of her ex-husband, Dan, how crazy they were, how immature. How they’d knocked his bed off the shaky cinderblock frame a few times, climbing on top of each other. How her mother had cried at the sight of her in a wedding dress. “So grown up,”…
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Candelaria
Fiction by Michael Mark The funeral was stodgy and the minister had as much to say about the real Johnny as I did about the real Woodrow Wilson. He talked about living brightly like it was a certain kind of apple—like there were many types of apples in the orchard, but you knew the good…