Here in the northern hemisphere it’s back-to-school time. For some it’s a melancholy time. For others it’s a cause for rejoicing. For me, well, it’s business as usual. For the boy in our first story, school means facing hard truths—about himself, about the world, about compassion. Eli Hastings’ “The Cell I’m In” is a strongly […]
A week before Christmas, my father left the milk jar for me to skim off the fog-colored fat. I found his boot prints in the ice kicked out of the goats’ water pan. The machine in the barn had also disappeared. My mother searched his things and found little missing: his graphing calculator, his […]
A honeybee fluttered its wings for the last time. It was the last honeybee, a sickly man-made clone descended from a tragically short line of sickly man-made clones. Its stunted wings were translucent and crisscrossed with veins. The blackish yellow fur on its thorax reminded me of the ducklings I saw at the zoo when […]
The cell I’m in is pretty loud because it shares thin walls with the other ones full of shit-talking and drunk dudes, but all I keep hearing is the fake camera-click sound that my phone makes when you snap a picture. It echoes in my head. I keep my eyes open because if I close […]