Newsletter:
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May, 2015The Reflection in Her Eye
Shawn Scarber Nina introduced Charles, her father, to Chad and I before we all settled down to dinner. I’d seen pictures of him from when he was younger. She’d shown me a few on her phone when we’d met in Boston to review the project’s progress. Now he looked deflated, like a pale raisin. His face was nothing but a long, sharp nose and a mantle for a brow. He resembled a skeletal hawk wrapped in a blanket, attached to the wheelchair he could no longer use on his own... Read More... Guernica René Solivan A man smiles and offers his seat. She shakes her head and remains standing, even though her feet hurt. When she rides the train, she likes to stand, to feel, on the soles of her feet, its power as the train accelerates and rumbles, shaking her to the core. She shifts her bag from one shoulder to the other, briefly touching her right ear, making sure her hearing aid is still hidden behind hair. Then, like every morning, her eyes scan the train for him, the love of her life. She doesn’t search for a handsome man but one with a kind face, approachable, with soft hands like the Cuban she flirted with for weeks, the one she dated for about twenty minutes under a staircase at the end of a subway platform last week... Read More... The Speed at Which You Fall Matthew Kabik After the thirteenth warning, Command told me to shoot, so I did. Three blasts to the bridge of the trader, just to make sure. The trigger felt hard to depress, so I made a note in my mind to talk to the mechanics about making the action a bit smoother. I thought about that, but not how the woman at the controls of the trader felt when she saw my guns shaking at her with the force of death. Speaking relatively, my trigger was more important at the time... Read More... |