Contributor: Marc A. Donis - - They started coming one summer night, after dinner. I was taking out the trash when I saw something move in the dark, out of the corner of my eye. It was a blender I'd put on the curb a week ago. I knew the garbage had been by to pick it up, but there it was. I went back inside. "I just saw something odd --" I started to say to my wife, but there was a knock at the door. It was our quarrelsome neighbor, Mr. Hink. "I wish you people could keep your junk off my property. I just found this toaster in the middle of my driveway!" huffed Hink. "Yeah... sorry about that." I was puzzled. I presented a vague apology, and shut the door. The next day at work, my wife called, wanting to know what color socks to buy. "By the way, I thought you threw out that broken blender?" I had, of course....

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Author: Marc A. Donis

Contributor: Huxley Innis - - PANIC. I suddenly realized...I had consumed too much. But it was too late. What’s done was done. But it was just too funny--far too goddamn funny for me to comfortably conduct myself properly in this very public, very volatile, and increasingly ugly situation I recently found myself in, and one from which I sought immediate extrication. It was some kind of rally or protest or something. It’s always something. There were dozens of people, yelling, chanting, some screaming; many were mad; most were men. It was an alarming scene. LOUD! Intimidating; a multilingual mélange of faces and boiling up from underneath, an angry mob mentality held back by nothing and no one. I inconspicuously made it to my office after eluding the crazed crowd by cutting quickly through a small stand of trees and down a narrow...

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Author: Huxley Innis

Contributor: Samantha Seto - - Downstairs, in the bottomless emptiness, Scarlet sat in the far right corner of the room in lotus position sketching in her notebook. She was trapped in a basement, way at the bottom of the earth, never trying to figure out a way to get back to reality. There was a plain straw-backed chair, a few pieces of old-fashioned furniture, and some cardboard boxes lying ridged and going every which way on the floor of the room. She imagined herself in a far away place, away from everyone else. A few pieces of fabric from a brownish quilt that had once been colorful draped like a curtain from a one-legged table toward the center of the room. The dust burned her eyes as moths buzzed in and out of the quilt, burrowing new pathways. The silence bothered her, so she steadily eyed an ancient record player nearby. Not...

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Author: Samantha Seto

Contributor: Luke Maguire Armstrong - - She’s decided to declare war on midnight, when she dreams of the railroad and remembers. A war to crush the dreams of the child who knew cockroaches, who met them at night when they scurried across her face, a humiliation to any humanity whose neighbors are the children who knew rats, whose toes were marked with scars from the nights when the rats had nothing better to do. Who was she? Because when she looks into the mirror all she sees is this woman whose face has wilted, with no one to save, and no one to save her, so she concludes that the young girl whose memories she keeps inside her head died in the desert, just beyond the tracks. When he’s unkind to himself he overdoses on certain albums, harmful harmonies whose melodic melancholy makes him feel less alone. But however we hold ourselves...

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Author: Luke Maguire Armstrong

Contributor: Amin Hosseinioun - - It was a hole in a long row of muddy walls; with a short roof and not a single word on its window. It seemed like the shop was hiding. A green eyed black cat was licking her kitty beside the shop. In front of it a horde of berries were hanging from their tree and enjoying shadows of its wide leaves, which cast a shadow on the shop. This was the first berry tree Man has ever seen with no berries under it. He was here after an anti-sneeze herb, farther from Ghanat-Abad[a neighborhood in Tehran] mosque, near the old high school, and past a few broken arcs. The window was dark and dirty, and the shop itself was filled with bags of herbs. Man pulled his tired feet to the shop, took off his gray coat and laid it on his left shoulder, pushed the glass door and stepped in. There was neither a bell nor a welcome....

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Author: Amin Hosseinioun

Contributor: Mark Slade - - AUG-27-19--- Mrs. Beasley rented me a grand room containing a lumpy bed and moth eaten blankets. The room is the same size as the room I was given by the bastards that said I was looney. That will be a word I'll not use often with my own lips, as it is a very dirty word. Mrs. Beasley is a lovey large woman just ripe for the picking. I lick my chapped lips every time I see her, and I see her often through the little hole I made in my bedroom wall. I always just catch her as she is finishing dressing or bathing her left side of her body. What were the chances mine and her bedrooms were next door. Just ripe for picking. Mrs. Beasley tells a tale of a missing husband at a young age. A right fool if you ask me. She said Father and husband didn't get along. The husband went missing a few months after they...

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Author: Mark Slade

Contributor: Miles Gough - - I thought I might have offended the Grand Fiend. It was about the food. He was eating his old stand-by, Pickled Presbyterian's Feet and I had a thin crust pizza with extra cheese and garlic. I said with a mouthful of pizza, “Oh no, I can’t believe I’m eating this in front of you. I am so sorry.” The Grand Fiend was his usual magnanimous self. “I will take your apology, for I am sure that you did something that deserves forgiveness, but I am baffled why your food would cause you to prostrate yourself so.” I said, “The garlic. The extra garlic. I know you’re not a vampire, but I don’t know how if it affects you and I should have asked.” The Grand Fiend leaned back, “And how does garlic affect the mighty vampire?” I knew I was being set up for the fool, but I couldn’t stop. “Uhm. Well it’s anathema to them....

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Author: Miles Gough

Contributor: Robin Wyatt Dunn - - I believe in the future.  I believe in the future.  I believe I do good for my children’s future, come what may to this old Rome of ours, I believe in the Information State. “What’s that, Dad?” “That, daughter, is Yankee Stadium.” I am only a product of the Enlightenment;  so are you.  Knowledge ceased to be occult back around 1700;  that which God had hidden became only temporarily obscured, awaiting the righteous tools of men. “Who is that, Daddy?” “That’s who we’re looking for, honey.” A pretty blonde. “She’s pretty, Daddy.” “Yes, she is, honey.  And she’s bad.” “She’s bad?” I see if we can get a third confirmation on the iris scan:  Interpol comes through at last;  they only have half our processor chains. “Yes, she is, honey....

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Author: Robin Wyatt Dunn

Contributor: Caitlin Hoffman - - There are times one must go mad. If not to protect, then to ascend. If not to ascend, then to revert. We were all mad in our mothers’ bellies, just as they were mad in their own. Were we all to be sucked back up into the vaginas of our predecessors, everyone would agree with me. Cuts must occur, if only to tie oneself back to society. The same goes for abuse and bloodshed, poetry and. Dream-drenched graveyards. - - - Caitlin writes books nobody reads. She's bad at writing bios....

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Author: Caitlin Hoffman

Contributor: Brent Rankin - - Hey, like I was sitting at this bus stop, waiting for the Number Seven, when Jesus Christ sat down beside me and asked for a cigarette. I only had a doobie. Of course I gave it to him. I mean, the Son of God and all that. How do you say no? He was wearing flip-flop sandals, worn out jeans, and a teeshirt with a majajuana leaf silkscreened on the front. He had the long hair, beard, and all. “Are you…?” “Yeah, yeah. Yeah,” he said. The questioned annoyed him. “What? You think I’m Windall Wilke?” “Who’s Windall Wilke?” “I don’t know. I just like the sound of the name. Kinda flows.” He fired up the smoke, sucked a long drag, exhaled, and sighed. “Damn, that’s good,” he said and then, “Bet you got a few questions, uh?” He sucked in more smoke. “I guess. Are you really Him?” “What? Flowing...

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Author: Brent Rankin

Contributor: Sean Crose - - Back in '95 I was really into the postimpressionists. Van Gogh and Gauguin were my favorites. I'd watch the Altman film, Vincent and Theo late at night by myself in my parent's den while getting loaded on beer, taking time every few minutes to step out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette and reflect. Those were the times. Art was important. Life was a mysterious, golden gift from God. I had a girlfriend at the time named Gretchen who lived up in Western Massachusetts, by the Vermont border. On the weekends I'd ride up the to see her and on the ride back home I'd check out the fields and hills around the areas of Sunderland and Amherst and marvel at the colors. Everything looked almost purple or blush – just like in the Gauguin paintings of Tahiti. I'm not sure whether the fields and hills really looked...

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Author: Sean Crose

Contributor: Mike Wiley - - My grandmother hated spiders. “Never turn your back on one that’s alive,” she said to me. “And not even when you think its dead.” I’m not sure what they ever did to her. Despite her warnings and condemnations, I grew up more or less indifferent towards the arachnid community. I guess you could say I even had one as a pet through my first year of college. A tree-horned daddy long leg had made a home behind one of my stereo speakers. It didn’t bother me, and I didn’t bother it. The thing even seemed to like most of my music. The harder, the better. If I played Slayer or The Dillinger Escape Plan, it would come out from behind the speaker and do a little bobbing, swaying motion. Nothing fancy. It’s not like it was a goddamn tap dancer; just a spider. Though I think it really liked The Refused, because it...

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Author: Mike Wiley

Contributor: Mike Putnam - - The Taylor Triplets. The unvanquished juniors at our public ivy. Blonde, from one of the richer suburbs outside of Columbus with an Irish city's name. We had an entry for them, but it was a blank page once clicked. A member of ours had been on the case of the dyed-brown-one since fall of their sophomore year to no avail. Glasses-clad had a boyfriend going to OSU from another one of the 270 loop suburbs, or so we had heard. Intel was understandably weak due to the majority of the female student body knowing about our database. Someone once tried to tag all three of them under the TBSD (Taken But Still Down) category but it was removed from their page the next day after more than a thousand down-votes and hundreds of heated comments. Many of those comments about how, regardless of the validity of the statement,...

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Author: Mike Putnam

Contributor: Nicole St.Onge - - I sat outside the house, as I had been for several days now, reminiscing the time that I had spent silently hiding among the grass in a sprawling field. I remembered watching as they came, creatures in pairs and groups, sauntering along and stopping occasionally to pick up and observe my companions with eager eyes. If one was not satisfactory, he would be dropped back onto the ground carelessly, and the creatures would continue on, leaving us glad that we had survived another day. After a good time of evading the eye of the creatures and hoping that I wouldn’t be the one to be taken next, it was to my dismay that I was selected by a group of takers. Upon my arrival to their small dwelling, I was set on a table beside a few of my new acquaintances. We were terrified and curious as to what our fates would...

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Author: Nicole St.Onge

Contributor: Eric Suhem - - Sally looked at the pile of lima beans on her plate. “I don’t like this food, why do I have to eat it?” “Be quiet and eat your lima beans, or you’ll go to your room.” said her mother. At the bean conference in Lima, Ohio, on a small table, in the middle of the auditorium, under harsh white light, sat a single lima bean. “We all must eat the town bean,” was the general agreement voiced.  “But I don’t want to!” responded a small child’s voice, to which the instant response was to remove the youngster from the room. There was an argument in the auditorium about the origins of the lima bean. “The lima bean’s origins are in Lima, Peru,” correctly asserted a woman in a pea-green sundress, and there were roars of agreement throughout the auditorium. A man in a...

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Author: Eric Suhem

Contributor: Chris Rhatigan - - I drive on the interstate. Things are very loud. It is like the car is a noise-absorbing box. I cover my ears. The car veers toward the guard rail. I uncover my ears. The car no longer veers toward the guard rail. I do not feel comfortable in the right lane. I move to the left lane. The left lane is uncomfortable too. I see a bright, colorful sign for a gas station. This seems right. The gas station sign should be here. The gas station sign belongs. I need to go to the gas station due to my desire to go there, so I cut off a pickup truck. The driver yells obscenities. Maybe they were not obscenities. I could not really hear him. I am driving on the interstate. As I may or may not have mentioned. And things are loud. As I may have mentioned. I leave...

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Author: Chris Rhatigan