Archive
Skyfish
by Rachel Rawlins of Frizzy Logic
Fish
The Abbot of the Week peers out gloomily. Centuries away from the end of human belief in gods and devils, a tiny human remnant strung out in chains of carefully salvaged and lovingly maintained technology, a greenly self renewing planet, and what do we get? Fish falling from the sky every Friday. Believers would know what to do with this, but we are researchers, scientists, we don’t theorize ahead of the data. After a resigned sigh, he picks up his pail and notepad, recites his ichthyology mnemonics, and heads out to the field with the rest.
by Zhoen of One Word
The 5th of July
Here we are in the first shadow, arms elbow-deep in the tub of nighttime. The gray bodies of firecrackers, smoke-snakes, and sparklers litter the sidewalk. The smell of sulfur hangs on the leaves, and just visits the sides of my tongue.
Up above, impossibly high, three clouds, like red flags, flee to the east.
by Dale of Mole
Cow Sister
The train mutters
to itself, no-one listens.
Looking out, her eyes are full
of early morning mist.
Every time she passes a cow
she dips her head
in silent acknowledgement.
She belongs with grass.
by Fiona Robyn of a small stone
Purple Moment
A dream I had not half an hour ago:
“I like yellow,” she said. “It makes me happy. But now it’s a purple moment.”
I agreed. Purple moment.
Just then a hospital gurney started to roll down the cobbled street.
We ran down after it, but it gathered speed and at the bottom it turned over, ejecting a huge man in a red shirt.
by Pica of Feathers of Hope
Night Shift
The garbage truck of dawn calls me to rise and greet the new day; my daughter calls, in counterpoint, that she’s too tired to rise. My wife replies with discord. Outside, there is shouting: The weird old man from down the street paces the truck from home to home on his antique blue American Flyer, haranguing the stolid city workmen. Politics and children make me want to shout, too. I hope I never get that lonely.
by P.
In Third Person
He drove her to see the great egret, leaving her to walk back to work alone, kingfisher rattle in her ears, while he went to see the doctor he never tells her story to. She knows he still loves her too much to let go. Methodically she strips away the skin on her right thumb.
by Susan (susurradeluz) of A line cast, a hope followed
Impulse
After flying for hours buoyed by a natural compulsion to follow the light, 400 warblers hit a net of wires holding up a communications tower in Madison, Wisconsin. The sea of night, like an expert fisher, corralled their falling bodies, while above them in the tower below the clouds our disembodied chatter went on without cease.
by Maria Benet of Alembic
Splitting
One hot night he fled, crashing the front door behind him. It opened at once and the mad, spiky silhouette of his mother, ashamed to come out in her curlers, yelled: “I hope the bogey man gets you!” He ran the length of their road, maybe a mile. He was nine, small and skinny and no athlete. At the corner he stopped, gasping, and sat for a while on the curb-stone wondering where he could go. Nowhere. So he got up and his body walked back, but his mind never went home. He’s been trying ever since to reunite them.
by Jean Morris of This Too
Index of First Lies
In the beginning and bisimillahi, sing muse and through me tell the tale of the man of the Spear Danes named Gregory Samsa who awoke from the firing squad to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover that all happy families are alike and stately plump Buck Mulligan in his younger and more vulnerable years must be in want of a wife who for a long time went to sleep early at the best of times and worst of times.
by Teju Cole
qarrtsiluni 