Syl had put up pictures of Brian in every room in the house – she had the ones Evan and Angie emailed printed at Blacks because she wanted the baby around all the time, as if he lived in their house instead of so far away. The snapshot in the kitchen was from the boy’s [...]
Fiction
Serenissima
Ray SmithSerene was she as she stepped from the foam of her bath onto the sea shell patterned tiles, but then Gwen felt again the switch in her side which she took as a threat, a foreboding. Something was going wrong, something subtle and complex, beyond the skills of doctors.
What fools men are, with their logic [...]
In Her Prime
Clark BlaiseTiffy Hu and I are passing by the hedges behind the tennis courts, headed to skating practice, when a horrible truth strikes me: life is eternal. There’s no escaping it, not even in death. I’m scuffling my shoes over the concrete slabs, over tufts of grass and weeds and the anthills and dried snail shells. Dogs do their business under the hedges. Flies drop their eggs. Smudgy little birds perch on the fence and hop through the thorny branches.
“You coming, Prammy?”
“I’m thinking,” I say. What goes on in her little brain? It must be like the birds, hopping and chirping. Actually, I do know. It’s sex, sex, sex.
The Words
Rebecca RosenblumColleen
Colleen shuffled the God pamphlets in her lap while Mr. Andrews chalked square yellow letters on the board. Boring. The white-paper one was cheaply printed: the yellows did not line up with the reds or blues, so Jesus was all halo, no body. Inside was just a boring list of Sunday school and Bible-study classes. [...]