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Taken
"All As We Wish" art by Edward Lee
by Aaron Sandberg
In the driveway, your brother will be burning ants—magnifying glass a tool he will choose to use in other ways than good. He will not come in peace. You’ll read your book on the couch in numbness wishing the universe would nudge you. You’ll wish for wanting. You’ll get your wish.
Above the skyline, a mothership will eclipse the sun, focus a beam, explode the little living things beneath. Some will be spared and abducted. Irony will not be lost. -
The Garden
“The Blue New York Botanical Garden” art by Yuko Kyutoku
by Jessica Payne
Nothing tastes sweeter than that of the earth, you convinced me, as we stood bent at the hips in the garden that summer. We opened our mouths wide and waited for the stalks to thrust from the soil. We lusted for the taste of tomatoes, eaten raw and ruthless like apples, their red juice running down our arms to show insides reversed. We spent hours there, balanced in different positions, our eyes straining for evidence that the ground had broken and a seed was indeed sprouting from within. -
Alzheimer’s Duet
"Hills around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey" Auguste Renoir, 1883
by Geoffrey Babbitt
“Using logic and reason to explain… is likely to make them agitated…. Instead, the best thing you can
do is not try to bring them back into reality.”—dailycaring.comI:I remember looking out our car window on the way there. It was early summer, and a whole meadow
was covered with blue wildflowers.Father:I want to go to the cabin now and sit on the back deck.
Not sure whether they were blue flax,
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Two Flash Fictions
"The Libertine" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
by Stephen Tuttle
Short-Term Planning
Once upon a time, a man looked into the future and saw that it didn’t include him. He wasn’t old, except by the standards of the very young, and had planned on many more years of good health. When he told the woman sitting at the kitchen table with him, she nodded solemnly to indicate that she already knew. He asked: What should I do, now that I have so little time to do it?
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Annihilation
"Red Sea" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
by Olivia Calderón
The earth is salted
with the tears of giants
and now only dead things grow.The seasons change around them.
Frost, leaves, thawing, they
never moved. Not an inch.But something changed.
Because the crops reek of rot,
the soil is boiling blue, and there’s
mold creeping through husks of husks.They said there was no other option.
They said they were grieving and sorry.
They said it would all be over soon. -
Speaker, Age 12
"Falling From Heaven" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
by Micah Cozzens
Sisters and I share a room and they say, Did you bite
my lipstick in half like a carrot?
No, I lie. I didn’t. I didn’t.
They let me sit on the lid-down toilet and watch
them try on smooth dresses
while they push their hair into cylinders,
coils that sproing hot and then, after teasing,
expand into voluminous gleaming,
lacquered to shine in the cheap lighting
of a movie theater, a bad restaurant,
