SEPT 2022 / ISSUE 18

BENEATH HUMAN SKIN

by Stephanie Feldman

Alicia knelt, leaned in. Something peeked through the dirt. A fleck of silver ore, a buried grave plate? A speck of red, like blood? She realized, now, that’s what she wanted to see: a bloody fucking monster…

SOUR SPELL

by Shin Yu Pai

Ylva Mara, a two-spirit Romani witch, gave me verbal instructions on how to cast a spell to solve what was vexing me. I’d found them on the internet. They ran an apothecary down the street from my house…

a natural calamity

by Amra Brooks

My husband used to sleep on the old gray couch almost every night. He’d stay up late watching a horror film and pass out. Gore before bed. For years, I asked him to go to bed at the same time…

FAKE FUNERAL

by Lindsay Quintanilla

We weren’t burying Abuelo’s body because it was already in its proper hole in El Salvador. This was for the better, my mother kept saying, because she wasn’t trying to see no corpse…

the cruelest year

by Debbie Weingarten

It was the cruelest year. And cruel beget cruel. By mid-summer, it’s true — I wanted everyone else to suffer the way we had. I first made the creek rise. From my bed, I drowned the mossy banks and the…

Small Gray Square Painting

by Elaine Close

I work in mixed media, predominantly oil paint on wood and paper. In addition to larger paintings, for about 20 years, I have been working on a series of small and tiny mixed media paintings, some as small as…