IMAGE NO. 1: Alt Text: Picture of the beach. At the top center of the image is an airplane that is about to land at the airport. Directly under it is a black sun that is rising over some hilly islands that block the view into the open ocean. At the bottom of the image […]
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It starts with crickets. We lie in the forest and she sings about colors. Silver and purple at twilight, rubies of emerald glowing. There is nothing to back her voice, only crickets. The words echo and the moon fills up her lungs. Sunlight comes in shafts during the day, she reminds us as we watch […]
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9 February, 2017 I’m trying to be normal but it’s hard. I’m scared of all the psychiatrists. I write this and stop, my pen hovering over my journal. I don’t know what I’m feeling and I don’t want to excavate, like I had been. I leaf through the previous pages, more than thirty of them […]
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Priyam Bhattacharya is from New Delhi, India. She works and learns in the field of psychology. She attempts to murmer and voice dreams, nightmares and observations through her paintings
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A girl, let’s call her Fashion, invited me over to meet her hamster. The hamster lived in a large clear plastic box, like a large storage container, but it had no top. At first, this startled me. Where was the top? Then I remembered hamsters couldn’t fly. This hamster lived in its plastic house without […]
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I. When your ex-boyfriend asks you to bake his wedding cake, say yes. It’s not about the money, although he will offer you a heaping mound of cash. He will spot you through the frosted storefront windows. Don’t make eye contact until you hear the door open. Pretend not to see him even though he […]
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Content warning: violence, self-harm Honey said holding onto memory is like trying to grasp water with spread fingers. She told me to hold on to the sweet ones, to turn my mind into cupped palms before they leak from the gaps of my fingers. If you remember anything, remember this: hold on, hold on, she’d […]
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I’m in a race with my lungs. Well, not so much with them as against them. They haven’t been very accommodating lately. And for full transparency, they’re not really my lungs, I’m just using them to the best of my abilities. They belonged to someone else once, someone who, I heard unofficially, didn’t survive a […]
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Even after Phoebe returned from the funeral, she couldn’t bring herself to make any more half-hearted attempts at getting something on the canvas. The shades were never bright enough, the lines looked stiff and lifeless. Phoebe had tried different tools, different mediums, different canvas sizes. Nothing worked anymore. She decided to distract herself before bed, […]
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The blow-up castle blooms like a ghost in their backyard. It’s bubble gum pink. Mara’s boyfriend can’t see it, gives her a look like not now, please when she points out the kitchen window. His mother is here for Christmas. They’ve removed certain books from their shelves, have taken down Mara’s paintings of naked women […]
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When Carla woke between them on Saturday as a small fish, flopping and gasping under the duvet, they decided to put her in the bathtub while they figured out how to get her back. They argued for a while over what temperature the water should be. Lorna said cold and Alex said lukewarm. Actually no, […]
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Undertaker was certain he had a quarter somewhere. But even if he managed to find the dull, ridged coin, he was unsure whether it was appropriate to tip the bag boy who ceremoniously carried groceries to Undertaker’s Scream-Mobile. In this particular case, the young man’s head was not even visible over the towering stack of […]
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In a modern-day miracle, one of my friends fell out of a tree and missed the ground, swooping up into the sky like a kite cut free of its strings. One of my friends tweeted oh my god oomf fell out of a tree but before she hit send, she got distracted by a TikTok […]
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The goddess of love sat in the row in front of me, two seats to my right, during the first lecture of Classical Mythology in Art and Literature. I don’t hyperbolize or lie; it was really her. She asked to be called V, which may have fooled the rest of them, but not me. It […]
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The summer before she met Ben, Gwen had a bad sexual experience. It hadn’t quite been rape, she didn’t think. He just hadn’t been very well-behaved. She didn’t relay the bad behaviour to friends. To them he was just the entomologist who kissed like a fish. To them it was funny. She had nightmares about […]
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He is a biology or criminal justice major. I don’t know if he thinks about me outside of class. He writes fiction that destroys me. “I really like your assignments,” he says to me the fourth class of the semester. “Thank you,” I say, cordially. “The semester has only just started.” He is 18, and […]
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Creation story #1: God makes a woman out of honey, dripping-sweet, wet and sticking and oozing grace, his hands warming it as he shapes and then she is there, the sun behind her making her glow, molten. She is sweet, she melts by noon. God leaves her in the garden and upon returning she is […]
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Turtle Mountain wasn’t really a mountain. Standing eighteen metres short of the accepted geological classification of 300 metres, it was technically a hill. This was a widely espoused fact in my neighbourhood, square in the landmass’s disappointing shadow. The Turtle Mountain High class of ‘96 famously taped together twenty yardsticks and planted the end into […]
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When I was four, I told everyone that my mother was a stuffed rabbit, but only because my father told me this himself. He is a toymaker, and the night after my mother died, he gave it to me and said this was her now. This was where she had gone. I accepted this because […]
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The Most Beautiful Things Could End Us by Zach Murphy a grocery list by Kelly Stohr Stonescript by Ryan Tan
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At precisely ten o’clock on the morning of March 23, the spokesperson of the World Health Organization entered the press room and walked up to the microphone. Assembled in front of him were reporters and bloggers from the international media community. The majority represented mainstream newspapers, television channels, podcasts and websites. A few were fringe […]
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The marks appeared overnight. I was drinking microwaved coffee in the kitchen when Brady emerged from our bedroom, pajama bottoms hanging off his hips. His mark sat, prominent, on his naked shoulder. “What’s that?” “What’s what?” “There’s something on your shoulder.” It stayed when I went to wipe it away, and the colour didn’t change […]
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For a moment after my mother closed the bathroom door, I stood on the other side, listening. Water was rushing into the tub. I pictured my mother stepping out of her pink house slippers, her blue skirt, taking off her gold jewelry and laying them by the soap dish. After the faucet turned off, I […]
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There’s a look Dallas gets on his face when he’s about to lose his shit. His lip curls, his eyeballs shake inside their sockets, and it makes you wonder: is this really a four-year-old boy and not some Antichrist birthed from a jackal and hidden amongst human children with the aim of mankind’s eventual destruction? […]
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Perhaps you’ve seen me in Central Park, a tall, white-haired woman in an emerald green polo shirt with a rectangular logo and the kind of khaki shorts made popular during the Raj. My official uniform and photo ID confirm my skill as a volunteer tour guide. I greet visitors from around the world. Most are […]
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I bought a fishing boat and sprinkled twelve life jackets around the deck. On the day of the tour, I wore a durian-patterned shirt with the Singapore Tourism Board logo on the breast pocket. Aaron, a bearded teenager with poop emoji earrings, shoved fifty dollars at me without asking for my license. “I study ancient […]
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pistachio milk a refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk floorboards upon which to set the refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk kitchen walls that house the floorboards upon which to set the refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk apartment ceiling to support the kitchen walls that house the floorboards […]
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I only knew her for one night. She was performing a show where she screamed for two hours uninterrupted without a single variation in pitch. I had no plans for the evening. Over a Sazerac, the hotel bartender told me he’d won a ticket in a raffle for donating plasma and her performance had been […]
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The neighbours all thought we were con artists. Maybe they were right. We met while waiting to view the apartment and pretended to be sisters to charm the landlord. It was never about influence. It was only about shelter. We just wanted to escape the heat. The ruse was instantly believable, even to us. Our […]
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My family has the luck of a penniless black cat at a high-stakes casino. When I was twelve, my mother, my father, and my older brother Jeffrey took a vacation to Hawaii. Jeffrey went surfing in the deep, blue ocean while I stayed ashore and observed jittery sand crabs as they popped in and out […]
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“You are too black.” “I’m sorry.” The make-up artist filed through a brown palette of bottles of foundation in annoyed haste. Her purple tinted nails clawed at them and they clamoured over each other in protest. “I have all the colours here; toast, cappuccino, caramel, cocoa, mocha… even mahogany. But I don’t have your colour, […]
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Dexter Dalrymple had no idea why anyone would want to interview him. Who would care at this point what he’d have to say. Maybe his family and a few old friends, in deference to his age and wealth, hoping to find themselves in his will some day soon. But he had agreed to this interview […]
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Maribel used to be a disco dancer, studio 54-ing it up on a Monday night. Today she stirs a Donna Summer song into a boiling pot on the stove. And a heart breaks every day she doesn’t dance. The swirling sweet potatoes remind her of herself. She imagines for a minute what her life could’ve […]
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It was a sunny day, the kind that always reminded Joe of childhood. He’d been thinking about his younger days quite a bit since his mother died. She’d been his last direct connection to that fading part of his life. He would never be sure again if his memories of that time were accurate, now […]
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It was a warm, Friday afternoon and my frat brother from Orlando was staying in the new dorms at Temple during his internship. His name was Mark: A tall, slender brown skinned Jamaican originally from North Jersey but now doing time in the Sunshine state. I had promised to hang out with him and it […]
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There was an awful stink in Jerry Dairy’s trailer. A stink like something died. Actually, Mary Dairy said that a dead thing in the trailer was entirely possible. She said that Sid the vicious guinea pig had disappeared a week ago and that now he was probably decomposing under the furniture somewhere. We emptied a can of […]
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The boys drank in one room. The girls in another. Always the same, no matter the letters. Greek Letters. Shabby sofa on the burnt-out lawn.
Read more“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.” – Marshall McLuhan No one knew the city better than taxi driver Nicaragua Mars. Because of his multi-syllabic name, his friends just called him Nic. However, for purposes of this story we will call him Nicaragua, because it’s a much cooler […]
Read moreMary’s very funny. Bob’s very regulated. They eat this kind of pie no one’s ever heard of. Once, they served it at brunch, and I walked in on them in the kitchen and Bob had his hand down the front of Mary’s jeans, just like that, casually rummaging around. I never knew what to make […]
Read moreWilliam Harris was sitting on his front porch, drinking coffee, watching the traffic go by. He did this every day around the same time, five in the evening or close to it, even on weekends, and he had done it now for several years. William, Bill to anyone who knew him, was nearing his third […]
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Ingrid passed through the revolving door and into the lobby of the Harrison’s department store. A man with a maroon blazer and matching dress slacks greeted her upon her entrance, a thin moustache outlining his upper lip. He looked to be in his mid- 50’s, with dark hair that he parted to one side, and […]
Read moreAltruism brought on my mother’s cancer—worried so much about others, we couldn’t have an address or phone number listed in the city directory. For me, as a teenage girl, this was an embarrassing thing to be UNLISTED. My mother lost three students that year to gangs—mostly drive-bys and muggings. One found at home, where no […]
Read moreHe twisted slowly as if he’d been smacked in the face, and his eyes rolled into his head. Then he fell flat and hard, like a thousand-year-old pine in the forest, crunching on the forest floor. He was motionless and awkwardly positioned, like a hit and run victim, and soon his face turned white then […]
Read moreAndrea Chang can’t sleep. Her wrists hurt. It’s a throbbing ache, deep inside her bones, that reminds her of growing pains from her adolescence. But it isn’t so much the pain that keeps her awake as it is the worry. The last time her wrists hurt like this, the doctor told her it was the […]
Read moreStephen Stevens had been deathisized, or desensitized to death, at an early age. It had begun when he discovered Stuart Stevens, his older brother, playing God in the attic. Not only would he pluck each leg off the small house spiders that coexisted with the Christmas decorations, he would slingshot squirrels, birds—and even the occasional […]
Read moreI’m sitting here eating what’s left of your cheese puffs and telling Derek the story of my life with you. As soon as he walks into our apartment, I say, “Lily left.” He says, “Oh fuck.” He looks around the apartment as if to see if you’re really gone. It doesn’t look like it. Your […]
Read moreOnly three hours prior had Hopper been engulfed in a surrealistic frenzy, a haze of anxiety and shouting, when he and Finn had hit a hard right directly after the Sparky the Squirrel sign, an oversized, gray, bucktoothed squirrel denoting his distaste for forest fires, disrespect for nature, and beer cans being lobbed into his […]
Read moreThe frost came early, and all of the flowers died. The gardeners were out in the morning, and you could hear them cursing in Spanish. Nobody thought that the frost would come and so no one bothered to cover the flowers. By eleven o’clock it was warm again, and you could stand on your balcony […]
Read moreand yellow and red. The spectacle is yellow, the evening is red. Red cumulus spread about the tent. Ceiling is the unknown. Round is infinite. Flag is subtle. 1 never returns. They arise within. Center is blindness, girth A circumference. They dangle the tent’s top with dusty wavelets of laughs. Swirling up, twirling, self- hypnotizing, […]
Read moreI started collecting secrets when I was just six years old. Like most collections, mine gathered dust in forgotten places and yellowed on old pages. When the sickness set in, like other people who realize that they are dying, these misplaced pieces of my past gained a newfound importance. Once you can fix a percentage […]
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VAGABOND CITY 