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.

Farmville

By Hannah Olsson

To sleep, my grandmother, my farmor, tells me to imagine I'm staring at a dark hole, and so I do: one cavernous mass settled just inside the fleshy part of my throat that swallows Swedish most of the time, that knit-wrapped space where I can only speak through cross-stitches, building up conversations like the pixel homestead farmor cultivates on the couch while the lottery creates lucky wallpaper over the bridge of her pursed lips;

"here I am milking the cows"..."here I am pulling the carrots"..."now it is time to fish";

we spend our days in this timeless space that feels very much like the dark holes my farmor visits avidly in her sleep, a place where we are only as fluent with each other as the extent of her gardening tools;

"and now I pick tomatoes"..."and now I go to town"...

and I nod, the way one nods when they want to say so much more.

Hannah Olsson is an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also teaches creative writing; her work explores the monstrous beauty in grief, anxiety, pansexual love, and other all-encompassing modes of longing.

Art by Hannah Olsson.