Stay

by Susan Eve Haar

“It’s okay.” That’s what I say, but it’s not. You don’t throw a chair at your mother. I see my daughter’s rage, her face flushed with blood, her skin pinked with a fury that radiated murderously. Only the two of us are in that room, in this house, in the world of now. Two women in a line of women, the eggs in her body, the future hidden in her ovaries.
I stand my ground like with an animal. I make eye contact. I don’t ask her to heel, sit, beg. I ask her to remember that I love her.

Picnic

by Karen Schauber

When the police arrive, the children are already a little calmer. Parents clustering around their offspring like a mother hen. The body draped under a beach towel. No one had noticed the splash, only the tree-swing rocking erratically and empty. A grief-stricken mother, her head bobbing in her hands. The serene Monet setting forever altered.

The Gateway

by Francesco Levato

After the white of the eye was punctured, and the liquid sac removed from its interior, the incision was supposed to seal itself. Instead, it split open—tearing the membrane between worlds that should never have been allowed contact.

I can understand why the surgeon dropped his scalpel into the widening hole, even why the nurse recoiled, leaving me bound to the operating table. It wasn’t that, or the inky blackness that emerged howling from the wound—not the blasphemous things it did to their bodies. It was what it left inside me…what I would have to live with.

Skyscraper

by Tygan Shelton

They called it a skyscraper. A new word, meant to convey its staggering height and needle-like peak. And perhaps its hubris.

They called it a skyscraper. At 40 stories and 500 feet, it was the first of its kind.

They called it a skyscraper. They didn’t expect it to actually scrape the sky open, as a knife opens a fish and spills the guts inside. They didn’t expect what fell out.

The Diluvians

by Zebulon Huset

Everyone knew that it would stop. It couldn’t rain forever. It never had before, at least. Not in anyone’s memory or family history. Houses were replaced with houseboats, dogs with dolphins. The children’s gills functioned ok, the next generation’s would be more efficient—they hoped.

“Time has a way of doing that”, they said.

“What?”

“Improving things.”

“Can you believe some people used to walk on land?” A common rejoinder.

But language, language had found itself to be of less use than before. Shouting across oceans was never their preference anyway, and berths were fewer and farther apart than children.