art by Richard Hanus

by Sharon K. McClain

The front-door frame is supposed to be the strongest in the house, so you squeeze into that rectangle while your siblings spill onto the front porch, vertiginous from tumulted terrain. It’s years before the public safety chant of “Drop, Cover, and Hold On.” Forty-seven miles away, tectonic compression detonates, aggravating a previously unknown fault, forcing mountains six feet upward, buckling roads and freeways. Disfiguring the landscape.

Your stepfather, Bob, roars that this is “The Big One.” Vindication wild in his navy blue eyes.

art by Cynthia Yachtman

by Terry Engel

My wife Shelley texts: “I’m going to a vigil for New Year’s Eve. It’s mostly singing readings quiet reflection peaceful. You’d really enjoy it.”

I’m paddling a kayak on the Forked Deer River a few miles away. The people in this part of Arkansas pronounce “Forked” with two syllables. The watershed drains a hundred square miles, most of it wetland, more lake than river, more swamp than lake. On the map the Forked Deer looks like the lateral veins of a leaf extending from the edges to the central vein,

art by JJ Cromer

by Laura Shaine Cunningham

I invested my 8-year-old friend, the wild child of our slum neighborhood, with the power to save me…and perhaps she did

            I assumed she had died long ago or, as the awful expression goes, was “as good as dead.” The last time I saw Diana, she was eight years old, sitting on the stoop of her apartment building on the mean streets of the South Bronx. She was smoking and dealing cards to a group of older boys.

art by Robert Thurman

by Polly Hansen

Two years ago, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and patted her knee, thinking it was my last good-bye. She was ninety-five. I was sixty-seven. We lived over two-thousand miles apart–she in Spokane, Washington, with my older sister, her caretaker, and me in Asheville, North Carolina, with my husband.

“This may be the last time I’ll ever see you,” I said, thinking she might die before I got out there to see her again. She could go any minute.

art by Mary Petrokubi 

by Marilyn Petrokubi

Mary still rested in her bed near death. Her snow-white hair lay limp on the pillow. The year was 1950, and she was thirty-eight years old. Mary was dying from pernicious anemia, and to make matters worse, she was pregnant.

In the kitchen of their modest home, her husband Stephen, a science teacher, was preparing shank bone meat with vegetables in the pressure cooker. In those days it wasn’t called osso buco, it was just meat and marrow. But it was exactly what the doctor ordered for Mary in conjunction with an experimental vitamin B12 therapy,

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.