art by Alex Farber

by Jon Vickers

Awakened by the phone
at 4 a.m.,
that hour when darkness
is deepest and most honest.
This can’t be good…

“Dad, I need help.”

A million thoughts ignite,
lightning bolts,
cold needles,
dragging you from sleep
into full and fearful life.
“Are you okay?”
“Where are you?”

Clothes on, shoes tied,
a quick kiss on Jenn’s forehead,
a note left behind:
It’s Frank. I’ll be back.

photo by Yasser Alaa Mobarak 

by Meredith Jelbart

I was an only child. I grew up in a place my father called Island Hill. It was not an island, but a house on top of a hill, in semi-rural Australian bush, around twenty kilometres from Melbourne. There were other children in the general area, but the hill was steep enough to discourage kids from wandering up to play with me; and to discourage me from wandering down and up again, to play with them.

I was not entirely alone. I had friends.

painting by Robert Rogers

by Sydney Lea

A friend from the dawn of our boyhoods is cachectic, a word unknown to me until I heard it from a doctor– a friend of similar longstanding– who’d recently seen him. “It just means he’s withering away,” the doctor told me, adding that our mutual pal had also dropped, as if overnight, into dementia.

I knew that in my own fairly recent talk with the man in question, he had kept repeating himself;

art by Catherine McGuire

by Bonnie Darves

I have a thing about dive bars. I like them, not just a little bit but a lot, and one of my sisters, Anna, is similarly afflicted. My mother accused us of frequenting them for less than noble reasons. “I don’t know why you girls insist on ‘slumming it’ in those places—don’t you know that you stick out like sore thumbs or snobs no matter what you wear?” What’s the point? she wanted to know. How could you tell her, in a way that she’d understand,

 by Laurel Doud and (posthumously) Gregory W. Martin 

You died last year after a three-year battle with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Six months ago your partner sent me your handwritten journal from 1973, her note reading: Greg put this in the box with his important papers. He wanted you to have it.

The journal was from the first months of our courtship.

I never knew such a thing existed.

In 1973, you were 26, newly divorced,

art by Stephanie Ann Farra

by Seth Kaplan

Let’s play a game. Imagine it’s the depths of winter. You wake from deep sleep to find your dwelling is burning. The fire rages. You have time to grab only three things. What would they be? 

This game has rules, but because this game is a figment of my imagination, I make the rules, and the rules are, everybody in the end, is safe.

First: Family/pets don’t count toward your list. But if you have a cat (or a son that’s dragging you down) by all means,