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Cover
Table of Contents
Editor's Notes
Donations
Submission
Guidelines
Website
Stories
& Essays
A Day In the
Life
_ By
Sida Li
Eight
Minutes
_ By
Michael Gettings
Jesusland
_ By
Max Gordon
One September Morning
_ By
Brian G. Ross
Patrimony
_ By
Len Joy
Reading Between the Lines
_ By
Michael Gettings
Scarring Truth
_ By
M.W. Hamel
Snapshots of the Ordinary
_ By
Monica Lee
Spirals
_ By
Robert Connal
Stars
_ By
Daliso Chaponda
The Jury
_ By
Jeremy Tavares
The Thief
_ By
Marva Dasef
The Train to Pennsylvania
_ By
C.L. Atkins
Poetry
735 Miles to Nootka Island
_ By
Nicholas D. Klacsanzky
Al Fresco Cafe Poems #125
_ By
Duane Locke
Al Fresco Cafe Poems #127
_ By
Duane Locke
Barnstormer
_ By
Lynn Strongin
Gilded Candy
_ By
Mina Blue
Marriage 2
_ By
Christine Redman-Waldeyer
Memo to Italy
_ By
Andrew Francis
Rain, Your Words, and the Agony...
_ By
Betina Evancha
Sarcasm
_ By
Juliette Capra
Textbook
_ By
Christine Redman-Waldeyer
The Unspoken Eloquence of the Sword
_ By
Anne Nialcom
Three Shades of Grey
_ By
Monica Lee
We Pay
_ By
Betina Evancha
White Dread
_ By
David Snyder
Writing
_ By
Betina Evancha
Art
& Photography
Keira Anderson
_ Photography
Anne-Julie
Aubry
_ Paintings
Whitney
Clegg
_ Photography
and Drawings
Eman Reharno Jeman
_ Photography,
Graffiti, and Drawings
Mike Pomery
_ Paintings
Jennifer Robbins-Mullin
_ Photography
Madia Krisnadi Widodo
_ Photography
Penny Wilson
_ Mixed
Media and Digital Art
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Snapshots
of the Ordinary
By
Monica Lee
Today she is sixteen. She is
sitting on the couch, head tilted back, watching a spider crawl
sedately across the ceiling. The front right leg steps first, like
the first violin in a concerto, and then the other seven skitter
forward as a spirited accompaniment. Over and over like the swish
and flick of a fishing rod. The house is very quiet; the only noises
come from the mechanical clock and the cat, which is retching
vehemently on the living room carpet. Her stomach feels heavy and
hollow, like she ate something sweet and unpleasant a long time ago.
She had felt like that earlier today too, when she was on the Bart,
studying the face of the sleeping man across the aisle, and he
abruptly opened his eyes and looked back hard, and licked his lips.
She stands up on the coach and pokes the spider, which flails and
falls onto the pant leg of her cheap, olive slacks.
***
Now she is twenty-seven. There
is a different couch, different cat, and different spider. She
sprawls across the battered Broyhill like a discarded blanket,
watching the spider spin, lost in idle contemplation. (Consider the
coy sensuality of a semicolon; see how it ties two ideas together
with the grace of a chocolate-covered afterthought. There is the
pretty, piquant comma, and the dot hovering over it like a seagull
riding the waves. Seagulls fighting and courting on the wing, and
the ocean below, tinting the air bitter-salty like come.)
Suddenly, she has a craving
for fresh tomatoes. A thousand images of tomatoes simmering on the
stovetop dance before her eyes in flashes of red and black and
blinding white. She blinks to clear her vision, and rises slowly off
the couch, clumsy as a pelican. As she walks towards the kitchen,
she catches a glimpse of herself, looking pale and drawn and very
pregnant, and sighs. There are no tomatoes in the fridge, so she
eats half a raw avocado, spread thin over toast.
***
Presently she is
four-and-a-half. It is a grey day, a carbon copy of the day before,
which was identical to the day before that. Such are the autumns in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is recess, and she is hunched over the
freshly mulched ground, studying it intently. Whenever she sees a
pill bug, she picks it up and puts it in the Styrofoam cup her
teacher is holding. Once recess is over, they will toss the pill
bugs out the second story window of her preschool, standing on
tiptoe to watch them fall. Tiny dark bodies hurtling across a sky
grey and shiny like fish scales, and it is so very beautiful but
somehow it makes her want to cry.
At any rate, hers is an
important and absorbing task, which is why she is concentrating so
hard. She is almost too busy to notice the more rambunctious
children playing Peter Pan on the playground, and never wishes that
she could be Wendy just this once. There are no such things as
fairies, but that’s okay because pill bugs can fly even if people
can’t.
***
Yesterday, she is fifty-one.
For once (and it is an oddity) her hands are idle. They lay in her
lap like sleeping cats. She is watching the city slough through
another summer afternoon from the tiny cement balcony of her
apartment. It is one of those days in which the heat presses down in
buttery layers like baklava, and the sweat evaporates off the body
almost as soon as it is shed, leaving a thin white crust of salt on
the sunburned shoulders of the construction workers. A cat sits on
its rounded haunches a few feet away, purring like a benevolent
pope. A girl, dressed in her best Sunday garb, escaped home with her
father’s penknife and is snipping off the heads of all the azaleas
in the next-door neighbor’s garden in a spirited reenactment of
the French Revolution. Three boys chase a pigeon down the road. In
an hour or two, her nephew, Jimmy, will be stopping in to share a
cup of tea. She falls asleep, and doesn’t wake up, even when Jimmy
bats her shoulder and shouts.
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