We’re having a late lunch, five women, widows now, who have been meeting once a month for forty years. “Dress-up time” we call it because when you are our ages—86, 87, 91, and 93-- few events encourage one to don a cape, drape a rope of pearls around a neck, or apply...
On the line, I run a double-forklift. It’s a lot like a regular forklift, but the forks both spread out on either side and when they fan out, you have to catch the grooves of both pallets just so at the same time. And you have to do it FAST. Also, the balance point is...
I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or...
It was supposed to be chess club, but instead, it was Gambler’s Anonymous, and that’s what you get in Moline. That’s what you get in church basements. It might be fried chicken, or it might be stale donuts, and I should have left right then, but I didn’t. I stayed. I...
In science class, Margot teaches them about the magic of snow. “Evaporation, condensation, deposition,” she says. On the whiteboard she draws shapes connected by wiggly arrows. She’s tall and wiry, spine curved from decades of bending over small desks. Her face...
When I go in, the sink is bursting with unwashed dishes coated with moldy leftover scraps, half-filled glasses, cups that balance precariously on the counter rim, ripped open TV dinner boxes thrown on top; there isn't room for me to set aside the cleaned dishes....
Marvin’s tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears bile-colored Crocs, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained,...
The shades are pulled down by Mick before the summer sunsets. Mick is a regular: he spends every day, open to close, in the bar drinking Bacardi and Cokes and shots of Fireball. He buys drinks for everyone and tells them he loves them. He loves me the most; he’s...
Kerry found a hundred-dollar bill at the gas station near pump three. It was covered in oil. She carried the money inside to show the attendant, Jeremiah. “A hundred bucks! What are the chances?” Kerry said. “Lucky,” he said. She bought two cans of Dr. Pepper, and...
It wasn't a date exactly. He said, "Do you want to see a dead body?" I said yes. I would have done anything to spend time with him. I was a secretary for the medical school, and he was a student. He liked to drop by and talk to me between his neurology lecture...
We want your very best work! Writers at every stage of their career are encouraged to submit, but we want writing that goes hard. We want the stuff that punches us right in the ear, perforating the drum in such a way it prevents us from swimming that whole...
The wolves are out again. I can hear them, their hollow wails in the pines, slicing through a storm of snow. It’s my turn to get the wood in. It was my turn last night and the night before and the night before that, too, but Father says I’m mistaken. He’s so careful...