Female Martyrs and Their Favorite Songs Steven D. Hamilton Wendelmuta—1527 A.D. When I think of Wendy, I try not to think of her ‘firme & stedfast’ (as one onlooker wrote) when faced with the fire, although I do not mind the thought of her in some ecstasy at her approaching closeness to the divinity…
Worms Out of Season KT Heins Before I can tell you anything else, I have to tell you that my mama left and that the sadness is getting worse and that the quiet that comes with it, it stays the same. You don’t get quieter the sadder you get. You just stay quiet after it…
The Twenty-Seven Grant Riedel Five hundred and forty fingers and toes, fifty-four irises and ears, thirty-six breasts, nine flaccid penises. I walked past them, steam rising from my black coffee. I had four minutes and thirty-five seconds to make the train. The sound left me eighteen seconds too late. Twenty-seven gun shots. Twenty-seven bullets passing…
Gramps Chris Bullard backed us from the dinner table puffing dentures past lips click-clacking false choppers like a machine gun strafing jungle. Hard-edged predator age an eon said he’d snatch our noses float them as trophies in his bedside water glass where he stashed that removable grin. We held ears against their chatter but images…
Dam Melissa Helton The flood happened so gradually we just learned to walk home the other way. Everything was water. Dreams about dolphins meant we were unoriginal and liars. Handprints of white flour on her navy blue apron looked like octopus. Besides, what are the whispers of the cloistered worth? The paperboy on his bicycle…
