by Jordan Reddington TIME TO MAKE a cheese sandwich, do it now. Wear slippers for the kitchen tile, duck egg blue, careful of Nippy, tail-waggling, skittish for breakfast. Slab on the butter, it’s thick and half frozen, white like a summer dress. Sit. Stay. Good boy. Give the sandwich to Nippy. Enough until lunchtime. King Charles Cavalier, apt. Load a basketful of socks and underwear, sniff around for Rossy, there he is, in the seam of the boxers, my sleeping husband. Wash him from the fabric. Cotton socks. Work shirts, erect the iron stand, anticipating, douse the fabric softener in, sweet l ..read more

by Alain Kerfs   FOR A FOURTH-GRADE assignment to draw something she is grateful for, Sofia draws a picture of a shoebox. It holds the gifts my father sends me from around the world, she says, standing before her class, exotic seashells, bracelet charms, colorful foreign money. Sofia has a special shoebox. It contains nothing from her father, although there is some money in it, battered American dollars she has been slowly extracting from the wallets of her mother’s boyfriends when they are otherwise occupied. The shoebox is important to her, filled with her get-away survival gear: b ..read more

by Marina Richards …if I were a nice girlfriend I’d chase after you, write sad girl poetry, but it’s not like I’m the one you got a thing for, oh no, I know who you’re into and he’s locked up between four cement walls in a 6 x 8 cell, so here I stand on my mama’s porch, dusty rain stirring up the twilight, cicadas buzzing my hair, pine trees swaying, and I want to hurl my phone across the dirt lawn into the icy water but I can’t afford to get another one and now Ryan’s not even here because she’s visiting her cousin somewhere on the moon, and who am I supposed to talk to about you, and Mama ho ..read more

by Leslie Johnson EVERYONE WHO GREW up in Blue Clay, Minnesota knew how to play Human Statues at the lake. I played it when I was a child, and my stepchildren played, and kids still play it there to this day, as far as I know. But I put Minnesota behind me years ago, so I can’t say for sure. We had a heat wave in Blue Clay one summer, the longest that anyone could recall.  Scorching temperatures browned the backyard grass and blackened the bananas we kept on the kitchen counter. Flies multiplied in the humid air, and Cal, my husband, stomped around the house with a rolled-up newspaper sla ..read more

by Tom Vowler Clearing out the loft, I find the journal you’d purchased on our honeymoon in Cornwall, the paper handmade, bound with twine. I recall how the whole week you filled it with poems, receipts from restaurants, an owl’s feather, sprigs of lichen. I have no forwarding address for you these days, so place it on the mantelpiece, where it resides like a beacon all evening. What it won’t document is what occurred on the third morning, driving down to the Lizard along car-width lanes flanked with sentinel hedgerows. Rounding a bend, we saw up ahead a farmer sitting in the road, head in his ..read more

by Phyllis Rittner We’re not particular folks. We don’t dine in French bistros, travel on cruise ships. I’m a retired stenographer. He worked all his life for the phone company. We’ve lived in the same small town for seventy-five years, raised three grown children who call us once a month. Every day it’s just us.  The summer picnics were my idea. Memories of sitting in my mother’s lap sharing ham sandwiches on a hill. The breeze billowing our red gingham blanket, her hair smelling of lemons. We toss items in a basket: a box of crackers, a tub of watermelon, the orangy cheese he prefers ov ..read more

by Didi Wood He loves you. His mouth brushes yours, tentative, inquiring, and a tiny, surprised laugh like a scrap of his soul floats through parted lips and mingles with yours, perhaps forever, a vaporous cloud eternally churning, the nascent ghost of the two of you. He loves you not. How can you know for sure? Before it’s obvious and he’s gone and you can’t do anything to change it, not smile more or sigh less or pretend to be interested in the details of every mile of his latest hike with his best friend since high school, Matt (Matty, The Mattster, Matterino), who doesn’t like you and neve ..read more

by Graham Mort GETTING A DUVET back into its cover is a life-skill. According to Maddy. A moment of achievement. Moments like that separate the sheep from the goats, the aficionados from the duffers. It’s about technique, like batting in cricket or perfecting your swing in golf. Diving from a high board and knifing into water that makes you smell of chlorine. Before that, water wings. So, it’s a learning curve. Bovril and toast in the pool café, your mum nibbling your ears on the bus on the way home afterwards. Why is love embarrassing? Maddy’s out in the weather. Christ knows why. She’s left ..read more

by Kerry Hadley-Pryce They walk all the way from The Centre. It isn’t that far, not for Joanna, but it’s a trek for Will, who repeatedly asks if they’re there yet. He hangs onto her arm all the way and it hurts, the way he seems to hold her back. She’s brought a picnic in a bag. His favourites: soft sweetened cheese with bread sticks to dip in, pickled onion potato crisps, cookies, water. Food for a child, not a man, she thinks, but still. ‘Not far,’ she says. ‘Not far now.’ She repeats it and thinks she sounds like her mother. Her phone pings a few times on the way, but she can’t reach it out ..read more

by Ruth Brandt ON SUNDAY MORNING, while the village is busy with multi-section newspapers and marmalade, Desmond grabs his shotgun, a can of Spam and a bunch of daffodils and heads off to the countryside. The countryside is a concept rather than a destination, but it feels right to head away from the village. Desmond will see how far he gets. Back at home, all is hellish. Well, Desmond’s version of hell. His hallway is piled four foot high with crushed cardboard, mugs and broken radios. The living room floor has morphed into trodden cushions, single shoes and biscuits. And as for his bedroom ..read more