Deviled Eggs

by Erin Jamieson

I add too much pepper.
My nose tickles but I’ve trained myself to hold back sneezes.
You’re up early, you say.
I spot the birthmark on your wrist, the birthmark I saw on our first date.
The same birthmark I saw every time you left marks on my neck.
I just don’t want to lose you.
I grab my keys.
For the first time in months, I step out the front door, running faster as you call my name, until my name becomes distorted, carried away with a gust of wind, until the pepper leaves my nose. 

Going Up

by Katherine Gleason

Wobbly from fitful sleep, I arrive at an oak door listing on its hinges—a tenement school house. The cold fist of the new job pounds my stomach. The grizzled guard, dead-eyed, orders me to the second floor. The once grand staircase holds no steps. The dark wood banister hangs above an empty maw. How will I rise?

A bevy of rats—joyful, bright, cunning—leap to the handrail. A queue of energy, they run upward, tails waving. “Of course,” I think, strength returning to my legs, warmth and purpose to my heart. I jump up and follow.

Matching Pair

by Christine H. Chen

She hung onto him like a coat on a hook, colored herself the same shades of him: matching sneakers, matching backpacks, matching starlit gazes for each other. Two into one like a vanishing twin. She ate what he loved, fish paste on toasts she found repulsive but gobbled without wincing, held his fish-smelling hand, followed his hikes in the canyon, slipped on a rock, opened his bag thinking it was hers and found love notes he exchanged with another woman. “It’s not cheating if there’s no sex involved yet!” he said. She threw a sneaker at him and limped away.

Vespertine

by Lorette C. Luzajic

She was a crepuscular creature, always, as much a part of the gloaming as the crab-plovers and fireflies. After she got sick, he would look for her, knew she’d be wandering the woods with the nightjars and the rising moon, or rowing in the thin weeds. He was still trying to find her. He followed her in the shallows towards the oyster reefs. The humidity now was close and dark above the brackish water. In the twilight bay, she was out past the lighthouse, and finally, disappearing. The vespertine world was closest to the other worlds, she always told him.

A Buck in the Road

by Robin Perry Politan

She was lost in thought when she looked up and saw the buck standing in the narrow lane, tip to tail taking up the whole pavement, a dozen yards uphill. Massive antlers. A doe wouldn’t raise the hair on your arms like this guy. His dark, glistening eyes, her light, myopic ones locked. What would he do if she kept walking toward him? Likely move aside. Still, she backed up a step, bent her shoulder into the trunk of an old, towering oak and waited for him to get bored, like her ex, and move on.