“Tangerine Road” by Ann Calandro
As I doze, my hands loosen on the coupons. My father keeps his apartment cold, but the car is warm. Sometimes I crack my window and let my fingers drift into the wind, enjoying the contrast between inside and out. We go grocery shopping every Saturday night. Per the divorce agreement, my father picks me up at my mother and stepfather’s apartment on Friday evenings at eight p.m. and brings me back on Sunday evenings at seven p.m. Every Sunday evening, I walk in with a ten-dollar check made out to my mother.
“Ad Immaculato” by Tess Light
He finishes the ritual perfectly on time as the clock rounds six a.m. He'll be welcomed home tonight by a sink, stove, and fridge that gleam in a kitchen reeking of food safety. Not that he'll cook in that shining room, but he will at least need to drink some water, and so, as a final touch, he double-checks his five-gallon jug, refilling it from the sink and carefully adding the recommended quarter-teaspoon of bleach (plus one or two drops—better safe than sorry) to ensure a clean supply for the next several days.
“There Until She Wasn’t” by Niles Reddick
She didn’t know the rabbit died in the spare bedroom underneath the bed. She just knew it didn’t hop through the house with its big white feet to eat the food she dumped in a cereal bowl on the kitchen floor, too weak to stoop and pick up the bits that scattered across linoleum. She thought the rabbit’s feet were too big, and she assumed it had gotten out and ran away.
“Bog Premonitions” by Éabha Ní Lionáird
He was a man, probably. Now he’s a body. Warped and drowned and bronzed and flattened. He’d lived and died. For an age he breathed beneath watery peat but now lay mangled under museum lights.
“Juncture” by Bari Lynn Hein
You hold out your hand and I take it, squeeze it, tell myself that everything will be OK. You help me to my feet, pick up my sunglasses and water bottle off the asphalt. I watch your eyes widen with shock and then narrow with concern, though you speak in a tone that’s calm and reassuring. As we make our way home, I keep stopping to sit on the sidewalk, afraid I might pass out.