OR, YOU ARE NEVER WHERE YOU THOUGHT YOU’D BE, LOSER! NOTE: This is a companion piece to THE TYRANNY OF ONE. You don’t need to read it first, but you may want to afterwards. My life and career are not what I’d planned. Once I got my act together as an adult, I believed the […]
When we boiled sap in the sugarhouse, I couldn’t breathe. I stood next to my father while heat billowed from the stainless steel evaporator, sap moving through the flues. It frothed with leaves and slowly became syrup. The maple smell, intoxicating and sweet, reminded me of Violet. I shoved logs in the firebox, then pulled […]
This week the world should have stopped its eternal axial spin, every living thing should have held its breath and taken notice. Because this week we lost one of our own. Staff member Lydia Ondrusek passed away on Monday, January 25th. In support of her family and acknowledgment of her life we dedicate this issue […]
The magician comes home, but his assistant has disappeared. He checks in his hat. He checks up both sleeves. He checks beneath the Table of Death and the Goldin box where he used to saw her in half and once, after too much wine, let her saw him because, she said, one of him wasn’t […]
This thing we call a heart that beats persistently in our chests is a sturdy yet infuriating and fragile thing. It functions without ceasing for decades despite neglect and, eventually, age. But a single word can tear it in two. It can deceive us and mislead us. It can cause us to soar into fits […]
I thought the tendriled horrors were angels when we woke at sea that disastrous night and saw them falling on the waters. Now, Suneeti, on this abandoned island, they are radiant in the setting sun, their translucence licked gold by dusk. The first one crashed onto the deck of our little boat. Its body was […]
My hands ache, ache, and when I look at them, I don’t remember them looking like this. Maybe it’s the skin, paper-dry and thin, like an old person’s. Do my hands look like this? I puddle cream in my palm and work it in, wringing my hands. Polishing them. Scales. I should be doing scales, […]
A sister’s heart is a cube, quartz clear, the size of a fist, suspended in the hollow interior of her porcelain chest. When Sister Margo’s heart began to beat again, she was immediately afraid that the other sisters would hear it and somehow stop it. It was the baker’s boy’s fault that it began to […]