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DEXA
by Devon Houtz He takes a step closer to the table I lie on. “We measure the hips and lower spine,” he says, framing his hands over my pubic bone. “That’s really all we need.” This is standard, but he doesn’t mention it. There is, must be, a clean and logical explanation, developed through debate and…
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Last Known Tomorrow
by Larry J. Wormington Your assimilation begins at the Military Enlistment Processing Station, or MEPS. If military service were a lobotomy, MEPS would be the surgical prep area. Upon arrival, you’re stripped to your skivvies and interrogated by the most highly trained and experienced medical professionals indentured servitude can buy. Don’t answer truthfully any questions…
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Yoro Speak
by Matt Hall I. When the aliens arrived, they came with jobs. Offers for jobs, at least. Earth’s economy had really taken a nosedive those last few decades and because many people had all but given up, the aliens, who looked very human-like beneath those clunky helmets of theirs, were heralded as the Great New Hope…
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Periphery
by Ross Gormley The boy is walking along his usual path to school when he comes upon the small pond, a perfect circle of water, no more than five feet in diameter. Gravel lines its sides. Stones in the center look like tiny black icebergs. Hundreds of tadpoles swim between them. The boy’s shadow alarms…
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Fearfully unmade
by Erica Charis-Molling In the beginning,god unsaid the dark.He drew in a long breathand unemptied his lungs.And the spirit of godunfloated, while the waterswallowed her, untroubled. In the beginning,god unmorned the nightand unmooned the day.God disconnected waterfrom water, breakingthe blue in two. God pulledback the sea from the landas the waves dug clingingfingers in the sand,…
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Yolanda & Selena Don’t Talk Anymore
by Melissa Lozada-Oliva I stopped you just in time.Now you’ll be remembered.They’ll never hear me sing.Most of the time,I’m a Villainor a lesbian.Jealousy revealsa polaroid of the women I am not.When I called you a “Bitch!”and shot youWhat I meant was,“Love!”I just didn’t want you to go.In another life,I am someone I can be proud…
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My Mouth Is the Mouth of a River
by torrin a. greathouse Language is a slick-tongued thing, how you can say thirst & mean instead desire. But hasn’tlanguage always led the mouth back to what fills it? Between the teeth, there’s a dozen paths to every meaning. Do you follow? I can say the oldest profession & mean I’ve made a living in…
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Inhabited
by Kathleen McNamara It’s late March, 1936, on a farm in Wald, Switzerland, a village in the canton of Zürich. A thirty-one-year-old woman, nine months pregnant for the first time, begins to feel a warm pulse of back pain snake around her hips. This is the start of labor: contractions that require silence to bear,…
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Such a Good Man
by Dustin M. Hoffman They told Eggy they’d be calling the cops soon if their missing kid didn’t appear in the next ten minutes. Eggy knew their type, fussy helicopter parents, the rich kind raised on fistfuls of pills and internet, who could afford to be chronically anxious about terrorism and plastic straws in the…
