The Ocean Never Really Leaves You

By Bethany Bruno

When the hurricane came, I watched my childhood street rearrange itself into a map of everywhere I’d ever wanted to escape, mailboxes floating past like lost punctuation, our front porch bending into the canal as if bowing to some god I never believed in, and afterward when the water receded and the fish lay gasping in the ditches, I felt something ancient in their mouths, a secret current that whispered all our names backward, and I knew then that the ocean never really leaves you, it just waits inside the plumbing, hums beneath the drains, remembering the shape of your house, your voice, your smallest sins, and every time I run the tap I think I hear it rehearsing the moment it comes back for me.

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author whose fiction and nonfiction have appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and magazines, including The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney’s, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post.

Photo by Jason Thayer.

Do It Again

By Kat Moore

Faster, faster, I scream as the golf cart barrels down the hill, my sister, 11, in the driver’s seat, me, only 6, small, gripping the metal edges of the passenger’s side, laughter rumbling out from my mouth as the cart shoots a corner, raises up on one side and glides tilted for a moment, I reach out to my sister, with her left hand, she clasps my right hand, and then the cart slams back onto the asphalt, our father running behind us on the dark narrow road that runs the length of the golf course, the golfers, the sandboxes, the ponds that we pretend have alligators, the trees that have coyotes and deer, the colors green and brown blur like an impressionist painting, which I don’t yet know about, but I know my sister, the way she impresses on me, her eyes large, her mouth open, I think she is laughing, but she may be screaming, she has lost control of the golf cart, but I believe in her, soon we will be home and she will read to me, show me the lines in the book for me to read aloud to her, to practice the words I don’t know, then we will watch movies, of little girls, like Helen Slater as Billie Jean in her short hair to look like St Joan of Arc, like Molly Ringwald as Andie in her pretty pink, who move faster faster than the speed of light, always trying to catch their light, my sister’s light, I believe in her to keep us safe, to steer the golf cart back to our parents, for her foot to find the brake, and she does, she always does, and the cart slows, her hand on the wheel, her right leg stretching, pushing down on the brake, and we stop, we laugh, and I clap my hands, Do it again, the way now, a lifetime later, on June 25th, 2022, approaching my mid-forties, my sister not yet fifty, I wish we could do it again, relive the life I had with my sister before a wreck took her from me, do it again, I pray, days I sit here by her side, remembering, remembering for her, asking her to wake-up now, the monitors go silent, now her breath stops, now I kiss her face and clasp our hands together one last time.

Kat Moore has essays in/forthcoming from Image, Reed, Bellevue Literary Review, Brevity, and more.

Art by Debi Babb.

Without Ever Reaching the Horizon

By Sarp Sozdinler

Now I am far, but one day I would like to love someone close, a tall person with laughter that climbs trees and eyes that change color with the sky, who wears shoes too big and leaves them at the door, I would like to love this person and live with them in a narrow house tucked between two train tracks, and in the house there will be one long table scarred with knife marks, three mismatched chairs, a jar filled with buttons, two tin cups, a chipped plate, a sewing kit, a clock that never works, some old pictures of our hometown nailed to the wall, a box of candles, one broom with crooked bristles, two pairs of socks always drying on the radiator, a stack of newspapers tied with string, one pair of scissors that only cuts fabric, and a book with half the pages missing, and every day this person and I will drink chamomile tea sweetened with sugar, race the trains as they pass, tie wishes to the clothesline, fold paper birds and send them sailing out the window, buy bruised fruit from the corner stall, draw chalk circles on the pavement, balance on rails until we nearly fall, collect stones smooth as coins, and write letters to people who are either long dead or never existed in the first place, every day we would do this and every day we would laugh at this and brainstorm to perfect our oeuvre, and every night I would press my ear against this person’s chest and listen to the words I don’t know yet, but the rhythm is steady like water in pipes, and this person I would like to love will know many things, but to me they will only tell the kinds that feel like secrets kept safe in a dirty pocket, and every night, over and over, they will begin with something like, “When the trains are gone, I’ll run you to the horizon,” and I will love love love a person like this, and every night I will be completely at home, I will be constantly nearing the horizon, running and running and running.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals.

Art by Sarp Sozdinler.