Katerina
by Anna Farrier

He loved the way she’d slide her fingers through his rib cage and run her thumbs across his heart. “It’s okay,” she’d whisper. “I’ll always protect you.” But after three years, a cheap ring, and pages filled with promises, she’s still gone. Now he can feel the maggots wriggling in his chest where she used to touch, feel them gnawing at his flesh. He feels termites with her name seared into their backs chewing away at his bones. But he only “looks a little paler.” “Like he’s lost weight.” No one sees the rotten places she left inside of him.

Wake Up
by Lauren Dennis

I let you into my fibers. I wove your sadness with mine and let our blanket soothe the goosebumps of my failing marriage. I yelled at my children to love me when my husband wouldn’t. At night, I will the words of my bedtime book to open a space in my brain without you in it. I sleep to dream you out of my system. Over three dreaming nights, you seduce me once, then ignore me. Night three, I shiver cold awake next to my husband, knowing that you, too, are trying to dream yourself out of my system.

For the Kids
by TL Holmes

Our bodies cling to the graveyard we call a bed, fleshy ghouls unable to leave the land of the living because we won’t admit that we are dead. We sleep, backs facing, as if we can be elsewhere just by pretending. In the morning, he gets up to brush his teeth and drink his coffee, and I stay in bed and brace for the “goodbye” kiss—that superstitious ritual we partake in; that little lie between us. It doesn’t come. He walks out the door. Light falls through my ghastly hand, and I fade into the dawn.

The Elasticity of Shadows
by Matt Weatherbee

The shadows are taut here. Ask Jim. He woke on Monday, stretched. A second later he was flying through the clouds. He forgot to close the window, so the wind lifted the curtain, and shadows flickered throughout the room. His hand crossed the lamp’s shadow, and when it disappeared, oh boy, it flung him—like a spitball from a rubber band—around the world. He crash-landed into the room’s window behind his. Ask him. He’ll say something like: “Took an albatross to the face. Space Needle almost gutted me. Do it again? Perhaps. Ain’t touchin’ no lamps anytime soon, though.”

Contagious Bottles
by Ashlie Allen

Remy wants to take a walk on the reservation but everything is contagious. He knows once he sees the dirty bottles scattered across the road he will pick them up to see if a drop is left. His father begs him to go collect them, but he stuffs his hair inside his ears and pretends everything is quiet. One day he’ll walk on the reservation and there will be no more bottles; there will only be drunken bodies to carry off the road.