If I Leave You with Moonlight, by Felicia Martínez
Even now I see the gifts of patient windows keeping watchas the road grows damp and the ravens gather razor beaksunder iridescent wings. Our porch light flickers oncetwice and the…
issue 27
A Catholic’s Guide to the Afterlife, by Julia LaFond
Everyone gets Purgatory wrong. Most people have a pretty good idea of Heaven and Hell, since those are more or less constant across the many denominations of Christianity. Purgatory, however,…
Driftwood Dead, by D.B. Goman
This beach with sand impersonating stars dead is longand all this wood has drifted farto be here out of water we don’t know how rareor how or why each has…
Till the Greenteeth Draw Us Down, by Josh Rountree
After the greenteeth took our parents, me and Squirrel moved in with Lady Lucy, who owned a bookstore before the water came and turned most of her inventory to muck. Lady Lucy had moved as many books as she could to her upstairs apartment, left her most prized volumes to dry out on the windowsill in the sunshine before shelving them in the various nooks and crannies she’d previously used to store alarm clocks and oven mitts and other things she no longer had use for. Squirrel called her Lady Lucifer behind her back, because our benefactor grew cold and cruel every time she drank blackberry wine. She’d indulge in bitter tirades about how lucky we were to be children because we hadn’t enough hard life experience to draw the greenteeth to us. But I knew that was bullshit. I was living proof that despair didn’t wait for old age.
Persephone Takes Up the Garnets, by Ursula Whitcher
Her father’s family wants everything lush the first time. An eagle’s feathers soft as rainfall, coins pouring thick as magnolia blossom, excess slicing from the belly to the shaking of…