Intelligent Design
by Jamie Benedi

“Poppa, is our skin our bones?”
“No son, our bones are inside our skin.”
“But Poppa, how does God put bones inside our skin?”
“Very carefully,” the father says.
Meanwhile, in heaven, God is peering through a magnifying glass, tweezers in trembling hand, trying to put bones inside a human.
He runs sweaty overworked fingers, gnarled and knobby, through his tremendous white beard.
“This is the worst. My next design will be a meteor to end the world. Meteors don’t have bones.”

Side by Side
by MA Banash

Oh, the stories we never know until now. But then they are always with us. Like birthmarks on your back that only lovers see when you get up from the bed, naked, and stumble toward the bathroom and the day.
There was that one. Really, where? What about you, let me look?
But they don’t. Let us look. So, we write stories about scars and tattoos, birthmarks and lies close enough to the truth to be believable. While they stay there next to us in bed. Sheets pulled up to their necks. Suddenly, modest, sober.

Damage Control
by M.S.

Whenever you drive past the remains, you grip the steering wheel till your knuckles turn white. At work, everyone is wary of you – a ticking time bomb. So you let words like ‘accident’ and ‘fire’ roll seamlessly off your tongue till you can’t recognize your voice. Neither does your wife. She’s never hungry, always tired, always lost. She disappears into the past, and one Sunday morning, you follow her. She hears the patter of tiny feet, the soft hum of the radio, the sizzle of an egg frying sunny side up. You cover your ears to stop the noise.

Blue Skies, Scattered Clouds
by Sean Koji Callaghan

Georg took out the trash and his gun that morning to end the Raccoon War once and for all. He fired, they scurried, glass pinged, Del screamed, her boy died in the living room, his face buried in his swim bag. The police had already taken their report and Georg away by the time the Kettle kids came clattering out their front door shouting for the school bus to wait.

Metamorphosis Before Homecoming
by Zebulon Huset

As the campfire’s coals smoldered by the tents, Tom and June found a mostly even patch of grass and conceived a child, Harold curled against a tree as too-much heroin swam in his veins, and Mike worried about Monday’s physics test, about bears, silly meteorites destroying his existence.