The Hermit Crab God

by ego_bot

“Behold the truth of this world, Koji, my friend,” said Masa. Pretending sophistication. “We live in a world made by humans, for humans. Don’t need a college degree to figure that out.”

Koji puffed on his cigarette. He was trying to enjoy the sunset in silence, but his friend kept going on about the trash strewn across the beach. As if anyone actually gave a shit about that.

“My dad drove me up to this beach all the time when I was little,” Koji said.

Masa took a sip from his plastic bottle of green tea. “Is that right?”

“We came up here to catch fish for my aquarium—snails, clams, whatever. Anyway, the place was pristine back then. I swear. No trash.”

“A lot’s changed since then.” Masa gestured his green tea bottle towards the ocean. “All those countries. All those corporations, those boats out there—these days they’ve got plastic to spare. How nice of the currents to deliver it all to our lovely beaches.”

Koji took a long drag of his cigarette, let the smoke mix with his thoughts. “We must be idiots to want to be biologists.” He exhaled. “All the coral on this island will be white as snow before we graduate, and nothing you and I do will make a damn difference, ever.”

“That’s the spirit. Rest easy knowing humans will get what’s coming to us. Nature will make sure of it, yeah? And either way”—Masa took another swig of his tea, then held the bottle out—“the sun will rise again in the morning. Hey, want a sip?”

Koji accepted the plastic without thinking. It was weightless—empty. He shot a glare at his grinning excuse for a friend who had just handed him trash. (Continue Reading…)

Hearts And Half-Measures

by Cassiopeia Gatmaitan

You eat the hearts of men because your father says that if you consume enough, you’ll turn back into one.

You think it’s all bull. Anyone in their right mind would. But he watches you like a hawk, so you always make sure to bring a fresh one with you when you stagger home past dawn.

He smiles over his cup of coffee, makes you one the way you like it, and helps you into your seat. Most times, he doesn’t even call you hijo when he asks about your evening.

This time, he does, and you clench your teeth as you tell him about the fire on Recoletos Street, and how you almost wanted to make one of the firemen your mark. And then you realized that it would have been too hard to tear his heart out through his uniform, that he would taste like smoke, and that the body would stand out like a stoplight, clad in red-stained neon green. You recall giggling at the image, but you know that your father would think you crass for that, so you keep it to yourself.

He takes the heart from your hand, and you continue your story as he heats up oil in a frying pan, slicing the meat into bite-sized chunks. (Continue Reading…)

Dimorphism

Jessi Ann York

Laura pours milk across her skin the first night the wolf spiders begin to bother her. It turns her bath water cloudy and congeals around the edges of her drain. She won’t dry herself before getting under the bedsheets, but she will check her email twice. It’s three-thirty in the morning. Her phone screen is the only light in the studio apartment. The wolf spiders’ eyes glow white in their stacked cages along the corner of the room.

For the most part, the wolf spiders don’t move, aside from the occasional shuffling of their three clawed toes as they groom their gray legs. Sometimes they turn restlessly in circles, laying down a nest of urticating hairs in their webs. Sometimes they flick their hairs at nothing. It’s these invisible barbs that irritate Laura’s skin whenever she opens their cage doors and stirs the air to feed them crickets and mealworms.

They never try to bite her.

They never try to escape.

They have no need to.

Laura imagines they know she’s keeping them safe while Oliver, her fiancé, is finishing up his visiting lecturer position at Newman University.

Out of the twelve wolf spiders, there is only one that takes any interest in Laura. All summer long he taps at the plexiglass, like a hand knocks on a door.

She wants him to stop.

She wishes Oliver would come home. (Continue Reading…)

Anthropology 201

Written by Kitty Sarkozy

College is a crucible. You go in a dumb kid, and with luck, you leave a less dumb adult, ready to take your place in the world. It took me a little longer than the standard four years. I had a job throughout, slowing down the matriculation process. It’s not all books, lectures, and labs – there are life lessons too. In college, you learn, grow, get exposed to new ideas, new cultures, and new people.

Do you remember that story I told you a while back, about that cow, the black Angus that showed up in the barn? How I said it came from somewhere else, kinda crawfishing into our reality. You know all about that. Wait . . . have I told you about that waterfall, up near Forsyth? No? Well remind me sometime. Don’t let me get off-topic. I’m telling you about college and learning to see what’s there, not what you think ought to be. Part of growing up is understanding that you can’t always trust that you know the truth, even when you see it with your own eyes.

Let’s see . . . that semester I think I was taking Anthropology 101, with the most delightful professor – Dr. Tragos. He was short, round, bald, and full of energy. Tragos had a dramatic voice, an energetic way of moving around the room, and a bookshelf full of antiques and specimens he used as props. He told the most exciting stories, making his class feel more like a play than a lecture.

However, you had to pay attention in his class; if not, you could get hit in the face with a human skull. (Continue Reading…)

Reflections on Bloody Mary

By Catherine MacLeod

“Maaa-reee,” my husband taunts. “Oh, Maaa-reee. Come out now, dear. We need to talk.”

Wrong, I think but don’t say. My mother used to say, “A real lady knows when to keep her mouth shut.” It was her favourite piece of advice. When I didn’t follow it, she whispered, “Sh, sh.”

“Mary, you don’t understand.”

Also, wrong. I understand my husband is a liar, a thief, and a joke, and his snug little world just imploded.

My mother would surely have advice for that, too.

I never wanted to follow in her footsteps, but tonight I did, right into a dark bathroom with only one exit. “History repeats itself,” she used to say, and yes, it does.

“Maaa-reee.” Shadows shift under the door as Leonard prowls back and forth. He’s drunk, terrified, and—SLAM!—determined to kick the door in. I might have 10 minutes before he goes full-out Jack Torrance. (Continue Reading…)

The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs

by E. Catherine Tobler

In the predawn dark, Annie found herself in a bed, holding onto another hand beneath the cool weight of the pillow. Floral case, it was the trailer—her trailer—and slowly she came back to herself, to her body, and kissed the folded fingers beneath the pillow before claiming the ringing phone, dreadful thing. The voice on the other end was frantic, offering double pay because the cops needed her—needed her boat, a man had gone missing—Ricky had that charter, didn’t she remember—it had to be her, there was no one else. Triple, she said. She lived plain, but there were always bills.

She dressed in the dark, phantom chill of the lake already clinging to her. Her skin pebbled everywhere and she was surprised when she pulled her hair back into its customary tail that it did not leak lake water across her shoulders.

It was twenty-four minutes from the RV park to the lake, not counting the time she spent hitching the boat trailer to the truck. Years ago they’d told her: don’t stay hitched overnight, anyone could drive away with the whole shebang. She’d never seen it happen, but there was plenty she hadn’t borne witness to that still was in the record of the world.

The sun stayed hidden the whole way there. The roads were barren and she liked them that way, listening to the even breath of tires over asphalt. Dry, smooth. The trailer had a wobble, a squeak, but it would wait until the afternoon—depending how long they kept her out. A man had gone missing.

It wasn’t the first time and surely wouldn’t be the last. She had helped the law before—it was a fine diversion, given how well she knew the lake, its surrounds. Usually people wanted to know where the fish were: rainbow trout, sockeye salmon. A man was many times larger than a fish, but the lake was larger still. Sometimes the lake won. (Continue Reading…)

Think of Me

by Lindsay King-Miller

Sasha and Taylor are fucking and Sasha is thinking about me. She tries to stop, but the harder she tries to push me out of her head, the more space she makes for me there.

She thinks about the way I fucked her –things she still hasn’t worked up the courage to ask Taylor for. Things she could only do with me, because there was never any question who was the more damaged one in our relationship. Taylor is very pretty and college-educated and normal in that all-American tennis-scholarship lesbian kind of way, and Sasha doesn’t want to scare her off, so she thinks about me and the good ways I used to hurt her.

This of course leads to thinking about the bad ways I hurt her, and there are so many of those. She’s rocking her hips to the motion of Taylor’s fingers but the rhythm in her mind is me banging my head against our bedroom wall. An image of my body the way she found it, slumped over in the bathtub, flashes through her head in the moment before she comes. Guilt and grief and rage and shame and lust all at once. She hates it, and I hate it too, but I can’t look away. I don’t even have eyes to close. (Continue Reading…)