Fictive Dream

Thanks, Lady by Dan Tremaglio

After writing very little by hand in a café over the course of an hour and a half, he noted out of the corner of his eye an old lady in a straw hat begin to pack up her knitting, to close her date book, to close her notebook, to close her sketchbook, to affix a plastic lid onto her paper coffee cu...

by Bob Hamilton

HE APPEARS AT THE DOOR wearing a woman’s niqab and dark glasses, smoke rising from the slit in his veil. I’m already speculating as to the nature of his condition, grateful he’s my last afternoon patient. I’m going to need more than the allotted ten minutes.

As he takes a seat, more smoke appears, esc...

by Abigail Williams

DAD LEAVES THE TABLE so abruptly it sets the cereals sloshing in my bowl. I haven’t been listening—Dad says I never listen—and maybe their voices have risen a little, but I am stacking my cornflakes using wet sugar as cement and my wall is getting sufficiently tall that it demands my full attention. Then Da...

Honeysuckle by Sophie Isham

Early in the first warm spring night outside a spaced theme bar, we drink fruity alcoholic slushies made with honeysuckle vodka. You talk about the childhood joys of ripping out the stamen and sucking the nectar from their fragile flowers. And I ask you to repeat that verb, sucking, and you do w...

by Greta Stoddart

I’M SITTING AT the kitchen table talking about the squirrel who keeps coming to our bird feeder, who clings to it upside down, bushy tail fanning out, while it sways sometimes quite violently in the wind.

– How can I deter the damn thing, I ask, though it’s not real...