Fiction
August Contributors
Aditya Bhatia,Cooper Clarence, and Kenton Sage Schmidt
honeycomb
by Nevin Nahar
“Now I watch, as the thing dissolves from a solid to a liquid. I knot one of her Dior scarves in my hands, and undo them, over and over. The orange flame turns blue under the spoon and the stopper of the syringe moves slowly.”
post-mortem report 270-26-g
by Rahel Gamma
“I’ve listened to Yves’ last report. The whole thing. He kept calling the subject beautiful. Said he healed on the table. I don’t know what he saw. But I believe he saw it.”
bless him
by Mario Georgiou
“Inside the coffin, Norman shivered. He lay in his favourite suit…He had a bottle of whiskey and three biscuits wrapped in tissue at his side, but it was too risky to indulge just yet. The last thing he needed was a resurrection.”
the snarls
by Camryn Brennan
“Our biggest enemy is Hazel Hairbrush. She always kicks us off Maryn’s head.”
citronella candle
by Pete Mitchell
“A welcome breeze blew, lifting the scent of the candle across the yard. Citronella was meant to keep the mosquitoes away. The candle flared, the only light outside, now all his mates have gone.”
the girl who ate her dreams
by Michael Hagen
“Mother says: eat your dreams while they are fresh, or they’ll fester and rot. But he hasn’t. His skin, soft beneath my tongue.
I have eaten all my dreams, a good girl—until him.”
table for one
by JD Clapp
“I turned 55 today, double knuckles, racing headlong into they call the Golden Years. Shit, with the ways things are going, fool’s gold maybe. Happy fucking birthday to me.”
the bears
by Aster May
“They love human flesh but hate these soft round organs I hold in my hands. The bears weave through the fires on all sides toward the scent of my skin. Mid-roar, they stop dead at the eyes curled in my fists.”
the war tourists
by Neil Randall
“‘This damn civil war has raged on for three long years,’ Tomaz said over his shoulder from the passenger seat up front. ‘The infrastructural damage alone will take many generations to put right. But what it’s doing to the hearts and minds of the people will never be fixed. Believe me. Hatred breeds hatred.’”
three fables
by McKenna Wilds
“Each night, Toad visited his friends in a quiet meadow, always ready with a joke. No matter what he said, they burst into laughter, for the Toad was known by all to be a very funny Toad.”
son of earth
by Kahlo Smith
“He dug his fingers into the ground, rooting himself like a tree to the earth that had given him up. Tears welled like mist rolling over Eden.”
make me real
by Seriah Black
“She looks at me, the first time any adult has really looked at me. It runs through my plasma like poltergeist currents.”
once i was medusa
by Garima Chhikara
“They knew my name, but they chose Medusa, the goddess, the untouchable, the stone-eyed killer from their favorite game. I hought they meant it as mockery. But they shouted it in exaltation, like a banner lifted high.”
roadrunner heart
by Christina Ellison
“It’s a summer hurrah before your final year of college, the last summer bookended by a school year, the last “real” summer, as y’all have been calling it. A childish conceptualization, maybe, but the notion had been born from childhood routine.”
crows
by Jonas David
“the late Mr Darling had been until his recent and (I struggle to put it any other way) horrifying death, a very competent and renowned taxidermist known for his large collection of blackbirds ravens and crows…”
frayed skeletons
by Frank Reardon
“The depths layered with sunlight swallowed the skeleton into the deep dark. The cars on the Tobin kept going to and from, horns honked. People screamed out their windows. The church bells chimed over the water. The fishing line began to twitch.”
can you hear me now?
by Jessica Edmond
“In the morning, I packed while he slept. On the kitchen table, I left a note. I didn’t write what I was feeling. I didn’t explain. I didn’t justify…I just wrote my name.”
solomon's good deed radio hour from angola
by Stan Kempton
“It was after midnight when the incident occurred…Whatever the reason, the signal was captured and carried, aiding in the brief escape of the sound of coarse fabric, the low-wheeze-of-a-breath settling in close to the mic, then a kind of voice only forty years of smoking can produce…”
binny
by Khushi Bajaj
“‘There is clearly something wrong with her,’ he had declared to his wife, and so Sonam had wrapped Binny in a shawl and taken her to the well where girls could be exchanged. She brought back Tinny instead, and Raphael loved her innocent sleeping face.”
the fall of mammon
by Mei Backof
“I could tell you things, things about the town of Mammon…None of the men swam Mammon Lake, not after the family down the street lost their little girl to the swallowing waters.”