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,

art by Richard Hanus

by Angie McCullagh

Half hidden by the filmy curtain, I watch a man wheel a human-shaped bag from the house across the street, the gurney rattling over exposed concrete. With hands shrink-wrapped in blue Latex, he shoves the gurney into the back of a station wagon and lowers the tailgate with a muted thunk.

Redheaded triplets live with their two mothers in that house.

I text my neighbor Carla to ask if she knows who died but she doesn’t answer.

image curtesy of the Public Domain Review

by Joe Sacksteder

Amelia Bones, Backyard Paleontologist

Amelia Bones was not the first young person to imagine that an oddly shaped rock in her backyard was a valuable fossil, but she was the first to have a monstrous Cretaceous-era marine reptile named after her. She began the dig just outside Hurricane, Utah, with her best friend Lisa Leoncavallo during the summer between fifth and sixth grade. But once she realized that this was more than pretend, she feigned waning interest so as to avoid damage to the specimen by her less detail-oriented classmate.