By Sophie Dess
This was when I’d lie transfixed by the light that only came on Sundays, with my small body wrapped in a quilt cocoon, my head pressed against the pillow and eyes open and eager. I’d study the pale green of my walls, lit in that tender, rustic way. Lit in a light so delicious that my nails would itch to scrape it off the wall and taste it, to capture its green warmth in a jar and let it glow, perennially, in a darkened room where maybe I’d take a peek at it for […]
By Logan Shafer
Read somewhere that women sequester apricot-sized pockets of stress in our buttocks. And that must be why she’s taking particular care down, say, where no one has ever paid such attention outside of those most irrepressible flings. But even then no because it’s not exactly copacetic with the way things happen when they happen. What I’m saying is that I’ve never gotten my butt massaged outside of a professional setting where they’ve actually included the technique as one small part of what is, or how it is in my mind, structured coursework complete with diagrams of muscle tissue […]
And I wish you never made love to me like you wanted to breathe me in like air, gulping me like milk dripping from strands of hair. Whatever. I don’t really care. Today I only taste those nights in New England on MBTA trains in autumn. The Providence to Boston line in November, when especially cold, is one of the only times I remember that train filled with the excitement of youth. You. You see, unfortunately, you are the first Great Depression. I don’t know how to write fiction because of you and for that I want to commend […]
By Geeta Tewari
September 11, 2001, 12:01 a.m.: your twenty-first birthday. Also, International Day of Peace, according to the United Nations. You knock on Ethan’s door and ask if you can lie next to him. This is your senior year at Cornell University, and you remind yourself that now, today, you’re officially an adult. You had met Ethan in the spring of junior year, when you sat next to him on a birch-colored chair in the back of 314 White Hall for “China and the World.” You had arrived seven minutes late for that first class. […]
By Sharon Willdin
The Nurse’s Home, situated at the rear of Parramatta Hospital, stands four levels high against the banks of the river. The Registrar leads me up the stairs to the second floor and down a polished concrete corridor, full of unoccupied rooms.
“This is the lounge.” It smells of cigarette smoke, has two musty lounges, a coffee table and a box TV.
“The kitchen,” she waves her hand. “There’s tea, coffee, milk, SAOs and vegemite. Anything else you want you’ll need to buy it yourself.”
“The toilets.” There is a row of cubicles with showers at the end.
A cockroach runs out.
I step […]