Online Issues
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A Normal Life
by Zia Jaffrey
Excerpt from a manuscript on South Africa
I don’t remember who we were planning to abduct. I may have got it wrong on the amnesty application. Maybe it was K in Soweto…
-(Security policeman, who shot his wife)On the train back from Nyack to Manhattan, after having dinner with my sister, I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t gone that far in love with anyone, except Louis. My sister and Frank were guiding K on what to expect when he met my parents. That meant that they assumed that this was it for me–for us.
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Traveling With a Door
image Lorenz Stoer (1567), from The Public Domain Review
by Sandra Hunter
The girl watches the woman—green beret, yellow balloon pants, blue shoe, white shoe, ripped red scarf around one wrist—an eight-foot slab of wood across her back, bending her into prayer. The woman prays and curses across the road in front of cars stunned into stillness. When she reaches the curb, she unloads against a telephone pole the slab, nestling wood to wood. She breathes heavily, head down, drags her scarfed wrist across her face and neck, looks up to the sky, stretches her arms wide,
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Horde’s Oeuvre
image detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - Public Domain Review
by Ian Power-Luetscher
A fucking gryphon got our mayor last night and now everybody in Pod24 is just losing their shit.
I hear the news on the community feed, during the “rise and shine” talk block. We’re in the kitchen and I’m pouring juice for Lydia when someone yells, “Kenny Staples got picked off by a gryphon outside of the bank. You can see it on securityCam8.” And then the feed goes bonkers, and I knock over the OJ carton.
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Cousins
diagram by Thure Brandt (1895), Public Domain Review
by Claire Donato
A woman and her ex-partner were together for ten years but never married, despite their shared affinity for The New York Times Vows column, which appears on Sundays in the newspaper’s Style section. Every weekend, they would read Vows aloud to one another— idyllic short stories of couples meeting, falling in love, getting engaged, and marrying, presented sans red flags or conflict. Any real interpersonal turbulence was smoothed over to the pitch of a PG-rated romantic comedy movie. They cut out their favorites and neatly
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How to Become a Mother
by Grace Sikorski
At birth, possess the requisite primary sex organs—one uterus, normally shaped; two ovaries, holding a million or so eggs, which will die off at a rapid rate with every passing year of your life. Tick tock. Tick tock. Start the clock.
Wear scratchy dresses and aching head bows. Wail as they pierce your soft, soft lobes with diamond studs. Play with baby dolls, kitchen sets, plastic irons, bangles, and glitter. Bask before the light bulb of your Easy-Bake Oven. Serve Ken sugar-spice cookies as he drives along the coast in his convertible beach cruiser.
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Prestidigitation
by David Prather
The first time I saw magic
it was in a deck of cards, easy
as plucking hearts right out of the air.
I believed in things like Santa Claus
and God. I tried to find mysteries
in smoke and mirrors, secrets
my father kept in his pockets
and under his hat. He taught me
how to trick a fish from water,
refract the light. The next time
was a vanishing act—my grandfather
