Featured: Week of Oct. 22
On the week before Halloween, while putting together costumes and stocking up on candy, we often become aware of a strangeness in the air. Is it the chill of impending winter? Is it the collective, temporary obsession with otherworldly experiences? Or does this time of year really open the door to something odd and alien? This week’s contributors illustrate such encounters. In “Slug Boy,” a story by Raud Kennedy, an office worker contemplates reincarnation and the seemingly otherwordly nature of a slug. In “House to House,” a poem by Bruce McRae, traveling...
Read MoreThey Come Back
The respectable newspapers, for the most part, carried on as if nothing were out of the ordinary. And why wouldn’t they? Ambrose wondered. Why risk the embarrassment of having reported the end of the world, when good business sense was to duck your head and go on assuming you’d still have an audience the next morning? The date in the paper’s corner — December 20, 2012, Thursday — seemed smaller than normal, if anything, as if they’d tried to slip it in under the radar. Ambrose chuckled to himself over the headline. It was some nonsense about next year’s...
Read MoreA Solitary Man
Louis Pickett had finally, after years of carefully saving his money, attained the status of home owner. The house was a small Cape Cod in a neighborhood changing demographics; Jewish and Italian ladies dying or leaving for nursing homes and middle-class blacks, Hispanics and single WASP women moving in. Louis’ house sat on a corner on a large lot backing up to woods. His first action after settling in was to erect bird houses on high poles. Possibly he could prevent the squirrels from reaching them, though he doubted this after watching an Animal Planet show on highly intelligent...
Read MoreHouse to House
A salesman going door to door, selling bottled rain and sniffed fingers, selling angel-scented handkerchiefs. A salesman in an ill-fitting suit, selling love-powder and paper aqualungs. Broken manhole covers. A dent in a bucket. Bio-degradable motion detectors. The uninvited, leaning on your front door’s bell, hauling a black satchel, carrying snake-hips and vapourous handles. Hair dye for the dead. A swastika of smoking ashes. Who’s selling two absolutes for a dollar, the semi-divine, and storm windows too – lest yon tempest offend...
Read MoreSlug Boy
The rain tapped against the bathroom window as Abby showered, getting ready for work. She was soaping her legs when she noticed a dark mark, like a swipe from a brown magic marker, on the tile wall. That’s weird, she thought, how did that get there? She leaned in through the steam to get a closer look. “Oh crap,” she said to herself with a start. “There’s a baby slug in my shower.” For some reason having the slug in her shower while she was naked made her feel vulnerable, as if somehow it could get her because she was without her clothes. As if clothes could protect me from a...
Read MoreMy Magic Newlywed Neighbors
I still have not spoken to them. I try, but they’re gone before my wave. A magician’s act of flowers and mirrors. The wife appears out one upstairs window, laughing, disappears, an invisible bird singing, then flows out another, dreaming her hair down. One day, a pink pillow case flaps its lewd humorous tongue at me, and at night strange notes leap from their chimney to the moon. In the morning, the husband exits in a rush, one shoe half off, then returns, bags overflowing with wine bottles and celery. I keep waiting for him to race out a trap door, his wife...
Read More