The Debt Breakers
Time: 1745 Date: June 8, 2053 Client: Natalia Suzanna Karlovskaya; (common: Charlie) Age: 31.3 Occupation: construction support; player Status: 000 Client responds to terminal bell promptly, shuts off machine, removes gloves, walks toward meeting area, produces cigarette, stops to light. Client sits on stack of cement sacks, smokes. Behavior consistent with history: client will appear at meeting approximately 1.4 minutes late; no penalty; Team Player Rating (TPR) remains low: 36.3. Client stands, crushes cigarette, proceeds toward “locker room” environment, arrives at...
Read MoreThe Banished
“Did you know that the World Before was much different?” Luke’s words startled Eve. They were walking along the grassy bank of Placid Lake in the cool, fragrant evening. She stared up at her friend in shock. No one ever spoke of such things. “What do you mean?” He looked around as if afraid someone might overhear. Several other New Eden Citizens, garbed in colorful tunics, were also out strolling, enjoying the sunset and watching the stars come out before the sky clouded, issuing the start of the scheduled nightly rains. A group of children, their laughter piercing the air,...
Read MoreSwamp
I’m out in the skiff, catching mullets for me Mam and Pap, when that boat like a raft sneaks onto me, but I’m not seeing it because just then the sun comes up, making all that water gold, and on all the islands, those palms and live oaks, they shine like green fire. It’s behind the islands, that boat. And I’m not hearing its Evinrude. Sister egret flaps over, looking in me eye, and pelicans glide in a line, wingtips just riffling that golden water, and there’s brother dolphin’s fin knifing, after those mullets, too, making them jump, so they leave...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of Oct. 1
On Saturday, I celebrated my fifth wedding anniversary with my husband. In honor of that milestone, this week’s featured pieces look at romantic love. Dwayne Thorpe, in his poem “Falling in Love Again,” contemplates the interconnectedness of love, loneliness, perception and mortality. Michele Hromada’s story, “Voodoo Love,” follows a woman willing to do anything to find true love. Scott Stambach, in his introspective story, “The Quiet Catharsis of Igor Isaenko,” explores the possibility of love flourishing in the most poisonous...
Read MoreIn Ireland the Notes to the Milkman Are Poems
I came down this morning, wary of you, hot day and cool shorts and furry legs. I counted up just how much you are due, I started my listing, a dozen eggs. I remembered your jacket, slick as silk, Pushing my body to the pantry door. I went back to my task, two quarts of milk, I felt your soft disgust, “you bleeding whore.” I crossed out cream, it is too dear for me, I almost smiled when I wrote half-and-half, And that’s when I saw we can never be; Not that you laugh, it is the way you laugh, You can’t even bother to seem to care. That will be all. Please do not...
Read MoreThe Quiet Catharsis of Igor Isaenko
The following pages were found in a Children’s Hospital in Mazyr, Belarus, by an American journalism student during the filming of a documentary. I Dear Reader, whom I do not know, who may never be, I write not for you but for me. I write because I can’t sleep. I write because Polina is dead. Currently, I’m drunk from three capfuls of vodka on a three-day empty stomach. I have Nurse Natalya to thank for this. She is the only one who knows how destroyed I am. She is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mother, and I know she thinks of me as a son. Like any good mother,...
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