Devil Gonna Catch You in the Corners

by Christopher Slatsky

THURSDAY, 8th March, 1849.—

It has been a trying journey over narrow deer-paths and rutted trails. Heavy branches of ancient oaks cast the way in shadow, yet I continue to write my thoughts in my diary—what Father mockingly refers to as “belles-lettres”. When I was a child, I kept a daily record during the two-month emigration from New-England to the Willamette Valley where Father had been hired by the Hudson’s Bay Company; as an adult, a mere two-days’ travel will not dissuade me from continuing to write. These valleys, these streams that break the monotony of impenetrable alder and oak forests make the wagon’s passage that much more difficult. (Continue Reading…)

The Genetic Alchemist’s Daughter

by Elaine Cuyegkeng

She dreams of death and rebirth on her mother’s table.

The smell of antiseptic: chemicals, artificial cherries and other-fruit. The specimen on the table. Herself, slipping a needle under the specimen’s skin to obtain samples for reconstruction. Finally, the disposal of the body while the new one grows inside her crimson egg, kicking her little amphibian feet. Later, a telepathic matrix imparts an (edited) library of the Prodigal’s memories. This reinforces the desired traits, knitted carefully into the genome.

In twelve days and twelve nights, there will be a single, perfected being: waking in the specimen’s old room with only a vague, uneasy sense of displaced time. There will be no official record, no trace of the original (save for the genetic profiles, buried deep in her mother’s libraries).

Everyone dreams those strange, mundane dreams of themselves performing their daily rites. The genetic alchemist’s daughter is no different; why should she be? But still, Leto Alicia Chua Mercado wakes as if she were a child waking from a nightmare. Leto thinks: there are fragments of bone and marrow in her pyjamas, in her blankets, her bed. For a moment, her hands are viscous with ruby red. (Continue Reading…)

The Uninvited Grave

by Jeffrey Thomas

“Fuck my mother!” Depo Ep cried out when he saw the new tombstone in the precise center of his field of corn seedlings.

By tradition, the dead were to be buried in the town or city in which they had been born, not necessarily that in which they had lived—even if they had never lived long in their place of birth, and even if their place of birth was quite distant at the time of their death. Therefore, the families of the deceased often did not own a cemetery plot or any piece of property where they could inter a coffin and raise a monument. (Continue Reading…)

The Sneakaboo

by John Waterfall

I bought the walrus at the carnival off I-95. The one that sets up in the lot next to the Carvel every August. And I say bought because I couldn’t knock over a physically impossible pyramid of soup cans. My wife whispered “pussy” into my ear and squeezed my butt a bit too hard for it to be funny. So while she and Jackson were spinning in the tea cups, I doubled back and slipped the carnie a twenty. Then I went cock-walking back with a big grin on my face, windmilling my throwing arm, a spaniel-sized walrus tucked behind my back, Windex blue with a pink Santa hat stitched on crooked. For Jackson it was love at first sight.

I said I won it, and to this day Meg doesn’t know any different. It remains one of the great secrets of our marriage. I’m proud that she thinks I earned it. But I bought it. And I wish to God that I hadn’t. Because for a summer it ran our life, and so did Jackson, who was an imperious little shit around that time. And I know this is something all parents say. But for us it was true. It really was. Because when we didn’t do what Jackson wanted, Sneakaboo got upset. And that’s why my nose looks the way it does. That and the frying pan. (Continue Reading…)