By Andrew Cothren
Panic grips the birthday magician's face as the rope of scarves coming from his mouth shows no sign of stopping; the children scream.
Andrew Cothren is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in Redivider, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Yalobusha Review, fields, and The Atlas Review.
Art by Andrew Cothren.
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.
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.