It Rises from Between My Bones

By Donna J. W. Munro

Sitting on the toilet for the first sleepy morning pee, I felt my ovaries twist as a little piece of me trying burst through in a micro-explosion of tissue, born into my desert of a womb.

It made no sense.

I sat staring at my bald head and face in the mirror hanging across from the toilet. If I weren’t the one making my features screw up in twisting confusion it would have been hilarious. Chemo makes your face strange. No hair. Not one brow or lash. It’s like looking at one of those big-eyed aliens that the tabloids are forever finding, autopsying, and giving breathless reports about probes and pregnancies. I looked just like that only not so green and way more dumbfounded.

How could my ovaries be spitting out an egg? I’d been in a chemically induced menopause since this whole mess started. Since I’d found that little lump in the same place they’d found Mom’s so many years ago.

My whirlwind started in the office of the doe-eyed technician running the ultra-sound. She’d murmured in positive little half notes until her hand froze. She stopped and pulled the wand out of my armpit, glooped on more warmed gel that honestly felt like it had been harvested from inside a body cavity instead of the little bottle warmer next to her keyboard.

Then she said, “Oh.” (Continue Reading…)

As Well As The Infirm

by Scott Beggs

$243,378

You get two shots at becoming a doctor after med school. If you match with a hospital straight off, bully for you, great job, give mom and dad a hug. If you don’t, you need to wait a year holding your breath while chopping off pig hooves for science even though you’re vegan. Then you pray you match the second time around. If you don’t, that’s it. You spent a quarter of a million dollars to disappoint your parents. 

That’s how I ended up taking a business card with only a phone number printed on it from a slick Wall Street-looking asshole with a bad cough while rounding my third shot of tequila. That’s also how I ended up covered in someone else’s blood in a knock-off Sesame Street bouncy castle, crushed by a murderer’s guilt and wondering if I’d survive to sunrise.

All I ever wanted was to help people. (Continue Reading…)

The Artist and the Door

by Dorothy Quick

The advent of the artist and the door was almost simultaneous. I have always wondered if the one would have been as sinister without the other. Of course, the evil was in the door, but if the artist hadn’t come along just then perhaps it might never have been released. I say that to comfort myself, but I know it isn’t true. Evil is evil. It is a power and its strength is beyond mortal knowledge. Even without the artist there would have been horror. He only served to give it speedier expression. 

But I am ahead of myself. The story goes back to my desire to have a carved door for my Elizabethan farm house. (Continue Reading…)

Notes on a Resurrection

by Natalia Theodoridou

the reporter

I heard about the story from the friend of a friend of an acquaintance, and didn’t put any stock in it at first. In my profession, you hear things like this with some frequency. You’d be a fool if you went running every time you heard someone cry fire. And if you end up getting your whiskers singed once or twice, you should consider yourself lucky.

But this?

I keep asking myself why didn’t I stop them. I was there. I was the only sane one, right? Personally unaffected by the tragedy. That’s what the judge said, anyway, even though I was never prosecuted. Not by the law, anyway. People stopped asking eventually, but I never stopped asking myself, all these years. Probably never will. For a long time I hid behind professional clichés: we’re there to report, not influence, blah blah blah. All I can say now in my defense is: who would want to be the person who robbed a people of their miracle? No matter how certain your lack of faith, how level your head. You know?

And in the end, I wonder, did we kill a kid or did we kill a god, and does it possibly make a difference. (Continue Reading…)