Jour de Repos

By Katie Shireen Assef

She calls the same hospital that sometimes dials her in to interpret for tourists with pink eye or bronchitis or allergic reactions to the mustard in everything, only this isn’t urgent care, but imaging, she’s been having headaches that wake her in the night and, once, in line at the fromagerie, a dizzy spell so bad she had to lean against the display case for support, the little wheels of camembert looming up through the glass, and when the voice on the phone announces that for the test her doctor had ordered—just to rule a few things out—there is currently a wait list of four to six weeks, without thinking she repeats the words back in English, then stops and laughs and apologizes loudly in French, and the voice raps out “We will call you, madame,” over the clacking of keys, and the voice sucks air into its teeth, and the voice hangs up (or the line disconnects) before she can interpret this, too, to herself.

Katie Shireen Assef reads, writes, and translates from French and Italian on a floral print sofa in Marseille, France.

Art by Katie Shireen Assef.

America the Beautiful

By Scott T. Hutchison

Forty yards away from the shore where I stood, a bald eagle divebombed the blue, still-topped lake—but, instead of rising majestically from the splash with his catch, he bobbed and flapped the surface in a panicked distress of his own making, his white head plunging under numerous times—I dutifully reacted as something tightened in my chest, and once I’d shucked my shirt and given everything I had stroking my way out to him, I applied the reliable Red Cross technique and approached him from behind, wrapping my well-intentioned arm around his feathered torso before methodically side stroking toward terra firma, him shrieking and hook-billing at my arm the whole time with echoing lake-goers gathering and cheering for me as I made landfall, releasing that soaking-wet bird, his talons sunk meat-deep in maybe a ten pound anchor of bass he shouldn’t have aimed for, everybody shouting how I “saved America!” while I felt kind of bolt-stunned, looking away from my shredded arm that would surely be taken off at the elbow, locking eyes with a symbol, enduring a rugged truth in the hard stare of superior indifference from a mad creature eating his way to freedom, his rescuer and his prey splattered with blood.

Scott T. Hutchison's work has appeared in Vestal Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Georgia Review and The Southern Review.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.

Castle

By Jefferson Navicky

He began to dig the grave at the edge of the woods, and he knew he had to dig the hole deeper than he thought, but once he broke through the top layer of roots, he found the unexpected: brick after whole brick buried in the ground, and it was like the dirt stored the bricks suspended in amber, as if the earth planned to build a house one day below ground, a stately mansion for the dead to sleep in the great underground caverns inaccessible to the living, this future castle awaiting construction, but the question was when, and by whom – sweat caked on his skin, shovel in hand, standing knee deep in a hole of his own making, he wanted nothing more than to volunteer to build it.

Jefferson Navicky lives in rural midcoast Maine where he writes about barns and cats.

Art by Salvador Eaton Sharon.