Just One

By Maggie Morris

I always say I’m not a smoker, smoking just one doesn’t make me a smoker because smokers can’t have one and I can have one, just one, so it doesn’t count in the same way it doesn’t count being in one of those casual relationships where you never commit but you keep going back for one more fuck saying you’re not hooked—easy to say when they’re not very smart or some little thing about them is off, like bad sneakers or a weird smell or a laugh that comes out with just a subtle snort, things so minor you’d get over them if you thought you might love them but you don’t so those minor things erupt into major turnoffs and you know it’s time to quit them and start on someone worth your time, someone to love even but then again it’s hard to start over when you can stay with the same old and pretend you feel nothing in the emotional way so the physical part is a momentary reprieve, like ending your day with just one, one suck on a slow death at the end of the day, the only time you can actually have the space to be still and exhale—though that glorious exhale is followed rapidly by a wave of remorse, a panic that you’re far away from yourself and yet seconds from suffocating from years of this just one, and now that you think about it all those ones add up to many, many more than you want to account for, a lot of time sucking on nothing, a nothing that always feels comforting like an old friend who always listens and doesn’t scold you to your face but now that you’re pregnant, just barely pregnant your body whispers there is a fullness you never felt before and that is a miracle because you’re over forty and now that decades old comfort of one moment of still solitude feels evil and you hate yourself as you contemplate having just one more.

Maggie Morris is a writer and artist in the small form.

Image by Maggie Morris.

After the Fall

By Michael Todd Cohen

After the fall, when the water and the government have evaporated, I try to drink the last of the honey from the bottle in the tea cabinet but its promise of sweetness has soured — so I slather it on my body instead to soothe the char from the incendiaries that finally stopped, scraping slow rivers of it down to meet my blood-spackled toes; honeyed I walk through the wasted world in search of something that holds sweetness in spite of decay.

Michael Todd Cohen is a writer and producer living in New York. He is EIC of Curiouser.co and his work appears or is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and HAD (a Hobart Pulp companion journal).

Photo by Michael Todd Cohen.

I Eat Myself—A Meditation On Severe Secondary Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis

By Katrina E. Halfaker

The voices come like dry ice—there, and not there, these impressionistic figures with peppermint oil saying, "Undress yourself and we can escape..." standing at the doorway, loose protectors; is this the before or the after, I wonder, drifting away to the humming pulse of oxygen, staining my blood pressure cuff yellow as urine, blinking at the clipboards and vials; here, time is not and neither am I, and death comes godless with no reservation: hello, body, mother of scars, daughter of the great nothing, marred by the screech of a harpy with one wing broken—I am a bear—look at the fur on my lips, the dirt underneath my overgrown toenail ledges; shaved and sullen, skin sagging like a wet plastic bag—I am a tooth and talon, beauty macabre; a natural strawberry with the taste of tarnished pennies stuck to the roof of my mouth, waiting on this bridge that is collapsing against itself in wordless profundity: I consent.

Katrina E. Halfaker holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Rhetoric and Anthropology and is currently in the Master of Social Work program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; additionally, she is a survivor of severe secondary Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis and is still in treatment—the case study on this, should it be desired, can be found in Blood Advances.

Art by Daniel Corkery Jr.