Fiction

Maureen Sherbondy

The student mentions her issue with run-offs. I picture storm water finding an exit from
the streets. Hog waste sneaking into a family well. Finally, I read her essay and see what she
means. Black letters have escaped the page’s margins, have fled from format and rectangular
containment.

“How do I keep them here?” she asks.

I suggest a lasso, rounding words up like cattle.

She shakes her head, says, “I’m no good at throwing and looping.”

Handing her a plastic bowl, I say, “Hold the Tupperware at the edge of the printer.”

Colin Bredenberg

The common octopus is renowned for its impressive intelligence. For instance, Octopus vulgaris has been observed in captivity to flatten itself and squeeze from its tank, sometimes traveling several meters through open air, in order to hunt fish in adjacent containers [1]. There are reports of puzzle- solving behavior [2], play [3], and long-term memory formation [4] in controlled experiments. In the wild, octopi have been observed engaging in complicated hunting tactics, employing the chromatophore pigment cells in their skin for both camouflage [5] and for communication during pack hunts [6]. On […]

Emily Ezzo

Candela said she was going to eat three tacos, because her ex-husband would tell her, “Eat one taco,” and her ex-husband wasn’t there. I was proud of her because she left him. Because for years she kept saying, “I’m going to leave him.” Now she finally did.

It was midnight, and we’d been drinking tequila, and Tacoria was about to close. Candela went up to the counter, to explain why we were eating so late. She said, “Hola, hoy me divorcié. Tres tacos, por favor. Y nachos con Nutella.”

Down the street, we carried […]

Harris Coverley

They were small children Jacob and Ava, just nine and five respectively, but their mother was ridiculously old-fashioned, and allowed, in fact, commanded them to go to the park devoid of parental supervision so that she could get on with her chores. If they were big enough she would have made them do their own chores, but she had decided that their little hands were simply too useless in a domestic setting for now, and so wanted to be free of them and their little requests for a time.

At mid-morning it was […]

Emily Ezzo

“Professor?” Cora calls up from a deep pit, holding a pickaxe.  “Can we go swimming before dinner?”

I stand on the edge of our excavation site, on dry dirt, hovering over her. My student is drenched in sweat, caught between jagged, white stones where walls used to be. “Of course,” I say, crossing my arms to hide the sweat stains under my breasts. “That sounds lovely. Of course.”

“So you’ll come, too?!”

“Not a chance.”

Cora swiftly returns her attention to her pickaxe.

We are in Paros, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Across from where […]

Don Noel

Boundaries – Fiction – Vol. X No. X

Penny almost tossed the letter from the adoptees’ group, but on second thought to set it aside to read. She’d sent them ten dollars just to be on their mailing list and keep track of their maneuverings, so she should at least glance at this latest missive.

Standing at Harmony Acres’ bank of mailboxes, she still had the slim, upright posture that had helped her command schoolrooms, her dark pantsuit blending a teacher’s casual neatness and a widow’s severity. Her complexion did not […]