art by Reena Choudhary

by Matthew Partney

My mother was abducted from the Free and Sovereign State of Tamaulipas in Northeast Mexico in 1964. She was one of three. Her older sister was abducted with her, but did not survive the journey north. The bounty placed on them allowed for an acceptable level of attrition. 

My mother’s sister was just the cost of doing business. She never saw her younger brother again. 

My mother told me the only thing she brought with her was her name.

art by Gregory Stump

by Patrick Browne

My grip slicks the shopping cart’s red plastic handlebar with sweat. Karen and Bob have already disappeared down the aisles with the ten- and fifteen-second headstarts that Dick’s earlier blunders handed them. I should have known not to bring him. In twenty years of marriage, the man can’t have stepped foot inside a supermarket more than a dozen times. He didn’t get a single question right during the Price Guess or the Product Name Scramble. Not one. Might as well have shown up blindfolded and sedated.

art by Kale Hensley

by Lianne Neiger

I used to bug my best friend Ezra with a ton of would-you-rather scenarios. He was usually game. The kid could pull an essay answer out of his ass to the craziest hypotheticals. Then there was my favorite one to ask: would you rather be the one leaving or the one being left behind? That one stumped him. I get it now. I thought I had an answer once, but being dead makes that shit kind of hazy.

What doesn’t being dead make hazy,

art by Abbie Doll

by Sue Allen

A pair of jewel-green macaws raced above Sara and David’s heads as they began their hike. The first of the hanging bridges, puentes colgantes, swayed like a giant hammock strung across the gorge below. Sara shaded her eyes and watched the birds vanish into the treetops.

“They mate for life,” Sara said.

David had already stepped onto the bridge, now wobbling beneath him as he reached for his phone. Sara took a deep breath and placed one foot on the planks.

art by Jenn Powers

by Zach Murphy

The Limbo

The cicadas are extremely loud this summer, and so are my mother’s outfits. The leopard print high heels, the oversized sunglasses, and the hat sprouting pink flowers are some of the more understated pieces in her wardrobe.

“You don’t hear about the sun when it’s behind clouds,” she once told me as she put on her beet-red lipstick in the mirror. 

My mother always looks so beautiful, even when she’s sad. Every time she comes back from the Friday night Limbo parties at Brunson’s down the block,

photo curtesy of the author

by Arthur Mandal

Pacifier

I have a memory of my father burning one in front of me as a child. It drips plastic fire between us, onto the ground, and I’m screaming insanely as a ball of burning yellow flame grows bigger and then gradually smaller from the pinched fingers of his hand.

Every so often, the lesson would be recollected and re-articulated, something along the lines of: “We all need to have our metaphorical pacifiers burnt in front of us now and again.” Even when I was fifteen,