a robbery

By TJ Price

You always have to have the last word whenever we fight, but this time, when you try to speak, a man in a ski mask crawls out of your mouth, scraping his shins on your teeth, and he assiduously sets to robbing us as if we weren’t standing there, shocked; he digs through the drawers*; he rifles through the shelves†; even steals the keys to the apartment‡; and finally, when he is done, he says something to both of us◊, then climbs into my gaping jaws and shuts my lips behind him, which purse like a keyhole§

* and thieves all of your underwear

† and rips out a single page from each of our books

‡ but only mine because you've lost your set again and that's what this whole fight is about in the first place, you're always losing things, always letting little things slide, like forgetting to lock the door at night even though I have said so many times I am afraid of things like this

◊ then robs the meaning of it, so that I don’t remember what he said in the first place

§ or a kiss.

TJ Price has left ghosts of himself all over New England, from the woods of northeastern Connecticut to the islands of southern Maine, though his most recent apparitions have been in the graveyards of Brooklyn, NY and Twitter, where his incorrigibly loquacious poltergeist can be invoked at @eerieyore.

Art by TJ Price.

Muddled Queen Mint

By Clem Flowers

Set adrift on the rhythmic jangle of soon to be junked splendor awash in spilled sugar moonlight while I collapse into the bed on the whiteout section of the graveyard train as I spy the poplar trees racing on the 10 speed wind waving on all us tired eyes rounding third & heading home & neighboring wires of old telegraph poles catching every last drop of misery floating away on a lonnng curl of poisoned mulberry smoke that seems to linger in the sternum of the city where the factory stacks once stood vigil & ended up on the same path as steam engines, pointillism, & the dodo & I'm drifting off on a high tar strained piece of linguini that SkyMall had the nerve to call a "Comfort Supreme Pillow" surveying the passing scenery & wondering if anyone else notices the flowers on the cacti seem to all be flint grey & screaming.

Clem Flowers is a nonbinary bisexual living out near some mountains in the deserts of the American southwest with their wife and cat, trying to perfect making a homemade sweet potato fry.

Photo by Jason Thayer.

Jordan Catalano Won’t Die a Heartbreaker

By Jeanine Skowronski

One day, when he was around, like, 36, he went to his old friend Tino’s Halloween party and he met a girl (not you, but, ehh, yeah, sure, I guess, if you squint a little) and he was dressed like a heroin addict (I KNOW) and she was dressed like a Boston Terrier, her Boston Terrier, a fat-faced dump of a dog named Flatrick Slobchunks (I KNOW), and they started talking, sort of on accident, sort of just because they were sitting next to each other on a couch, but he said something clever (I swear), something about Visine, maybe, and she said something tough, but disarming, something like “I’m sorry I’m drunk; I’m training for a jiu-jitsu tournament” and then her ride was leaving so she asked for his phone number (something you’d never do, something she never did, TBH) and a week later, they went to Hooters because that’s where they could watch the UFC fights and, at the end of the night, when he was thinking about maybe not calling her, about getting into his cherry-red car and finally driving all the way to, I don’t know, Temecula, California, she looked up at the fog-filled sky and started crying because, look, there was one really bright star; and he liked that she was crying, liked, later, that she cried so often and so easily, about polar bears and party favors, dentist appointments and dead fathers, his dead father specifically (this girl never cried about him, but sometimes, she cried for him, you know?), about half-birthdays and car trade-ins and that movie Firehouse Dog, which, yes, Jordan Catalano watched with her, and he cried too, because, well, he was waiting to—no, he was ready to, he needed to, he realized, so it finally would hurt less to look at things—and once they were both at least temporarily out of tears, he reached under his soft flannel shirt, his rough, white tank top, and took out his big, beating, bleeding heart (you know, you knew) and asked her to hold onto it as tightly as she wanted for the rest of his so-called life.

Jeanine Skowronski has published work in Lunate Fiction, Meet Cute Press, and Dwelling Literary, and was a finalist in NYC Midnight’s 2019 Short Story Challenge.

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