SEPTEMBER 2026

What she actually said was she wasn’t old enough to drink. Then she asked how old I was. I said 25 even though I’m staring 30 in the face. She didn’t look like she believed me. Later she and another female associate stood behind the counter whispering and throwing me looks while I unjammed a self-service copier. I moved paper around to avoid her eyes and gave myself a papercut.

Fuck! I sucked the blood beading on my pinky. The two associates giggled.

Jesus nods and goes back to the TV. Judge Judy is really ripping into the defendant, saying he got what he deserved. My pinky starts to throb again. I keep my eyes on the sad sack on screen, whose eyelids twitch in a clearly guilty manner.

What should I do?

I cut to the chase. Jesus must have more important people to guilt and I desperately need a band aid for my finger. I mean, why else is he here? Every time I go to family gatherings, all anyone asks is what am I going to do with my life. I left the last one at Christmas after the fourth person asked me that, and now Mom’s lighting votive candles for me.

Ask someone your own age, Jesus replies.

Then Jesus sees my face and sighs. He gets up and turns Judge Judy off.

What you need is a sandwich.

I didn’t want a sandwich, but my stomach growls. I pad barefoot behind Jesus and follow him into the kitchen.

Jesus opens the fridge and takes out ham, cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo. I stand behind him, hands in pockets. I pluck up my courage and try again.

What should I do with my life?

God helps those who help themselves, he says. Wait, he closes the fridge and thinks for a moment, that’s not in the Bible.

I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been to Mass since Dad passed away seven years ago. He had a heart attack in the middle of a sales call. They called me out of my figure drawing class to tell me. I dropped out of art school with one semester to go.

Jesus lays out the ingredients on my small kitchen table and rolls up his sleeves. That’s when I notice them—the wounds—quarter-size holes in both wrists. I gasp, not because they are gross, but because they are beautiful. I’m taken back to my anatomy class in art school. We had a color-illustrated book that showed the whole human body, layer by layer. You started with the naked body and, as you turned each clear plastic page, a layer of the body peeled away until it was just the skeleton. The muscles were beautifully striated and vibrant pink, the veins cobalt blue, the tendons and bones creamy white. And here I am, sitting in my kitchen looking at Jesus’ wrists and seeing a cross-section of my anatomy book come to life.

I forget about my pinky and dig out my pastels and a large pad of paper from the back of the closet, untouched since art school. I sit back down at the table and prop the pad against my knees. I watch the way Jesus’ hands move as he makes my sandwich. Sometimes the holes frame the fixings so that I look at the bread, ham, tomato in ways I’ve never seen before. Sometimes the muscles, veins, and bones blend with the fixings in a dance of colors and shapes.

Do they hurt? I ask, suddenly remembering. Jesus gives me a funny look.

Not anymore.

I pick up a pastel and start drawing. I drew everything as a child. Instead of describing something I saw, I drew it to show what I meant. Dad said I was going to be another original, like Picasso.

My hand moves slowly at first, getting used to the feel again. Then more quickly to capture Jesus’ hands and wrists in motion. His wrists are narrow and delicate like a woman’s, but the skin is rough and weathered. I color his hands dark like aged wood, finely grained. I capture the neat way he spreads mayo on the bread, careful not to go over the edges. I outline the crevices of the bone, dabble in the ends of muscle fibers. As my hand skims across the paper, the outlines begin to blur and the colors run together before my eyes, until the red from the tomato is indistinguishable from the red of the muscle, the white of the bread from the white of the bone.

I rub my eyes and look up, gripped by fear and shaking from hunger.

Jesus pushes the sandwich toward me.

Eat.

---

Lollipop
By Patrick Lane

Timmy’s rental hospital is set up in the living room. In the big bed he looks like a baby bird in a condor’s nest. He’s flanked by an oxygen machine and a variety of intravenous bags and tubes hanging from a stand. I have come over to play Halo 3 with him on the new Xbox 360 he received from the Jimmy Fund Clinic in Boston. Most boys in his situation use their opportunity to meet Tom Brady or David Ortiz. Timmy just wanted to play Halo 3 before its release next spring.

His reaction time is null due to the relentless chemo and radiation, plus the morphine drip which dulls the pain of his now-terminal bone cancer. He was born on Christmas Eve and his twelfth birthday, in theory at least, is in nine days.

I revive Timmy constantly as he draws heavy gunfire from our alien enemies, but he doesn’t mind. He’s trying to grip his Xbox controller and his morphine plunger with the same hand.

“Thanks, Hunter. I’m sorry I’m so slow.”

I don’t mind, I tell him, it’s part of the game. He looks like a marionette of his real self.

I’ve been clean for ten days. I stopped when my father called to tell me that Timmy had gone terminal. I hadn’t spent much time with Timmy during his treatments, spending most of the past year in Chestnut Hill either high or dopesick with little room for family in-between.

The first three days of sobriety are the hardest, then it’s all in your head. That’s what they keep telling me at NA, but it feels like bullshit to me.

Mom and Dad are sitting nearby in lawn chairs. The living room has a large plasma television set but there are no bookshelves or reading material in the entire lower floor, aside from a copy of the Boston Sunday Herald’s Sports section and a TV Guide.

Everything is much cleaner than usual. The doctors must have pressed my parents on sanitation.

This TV is even bigger than the last one. We broke that one playing Wii Sports. Dad was furious when he saw the glass screen spidering and the bizarre colors sputter and die within the web. Timmy and I couldn’t stop laughing. The real Timmy, not the waxen shade in the too-big bed.

Mom occasionally raises a plastic cup of juice to Timmy’s lips so he can have a sip while he plays. He’s in a lot of pain but he has tried to hide it. I think he’s doing it for me, to look tough and grown-up in front of his big brother. I can’t bring myself to tell him not to worry about it, that it’s going to be okay. It won’t be okay. I will go take my Finals tomorrow while he lies there as the cancer eats him from inside out like a worm.

I can’t help myself when I watch Timmy’s little hand depress the plunger for the bag which feeds him his drip of morphine. “What happens to the leftover meds after Timmy’s gone?” The question almost escapes my lips until I realize I can just go to the medicine cabinet and check for myself.

“I need to use the bathroom, then I’m going to head back to campus. Finals start tomorrow.”

Timmy lets out a sigh, then looks at Mom and Dad. He seems like he is about to fall asleep anyway. Mom and Dad look at each other for a moment then look away and nod. Do they know what I’ve been doing in Chestnut Hill? I head up the stairs into the bathroom.

The inside of the cabinet is bursting with swabs, gauze, bandages, tubes, all sorts of disposable medical gear of no use to me. I rifle through them to get to the good stuff, and then I find it. Lollipops and patches filled with fentanyl. I expected the pain meds to be locked up in some kind of box or case, and I can’t believe my luck. I came home to play Halo with Timmy. Mission accomplished. Now it’s time for my reward.

The patches are small, like little square band-aids. Too much kick for Timmy, but perfect for me. The lollipops are white sticks with plastic nubs on either end. The lollipop moniker seems like a weird joke.

I stuff the goods into my jean pockets, shut the cabinet, and head downstairs. I hug everyone goodbye. I make sure not to get close enough for anyone to brush my legs. Timmy feels like paper in my arms. It’s dark outside. His aura sticks to me as I hop into my car and drive away.

Hopefully I can pick up some pills on the way back to the dorms. I send a text to Chris, the guy from Brighton.

The text: 911 emergency bro.

It’s a borrowed line from It’s Always Sunny.

Ten days.

No powder, no needles. I don’t even think this counts as a relapse, just taking a break from sobriety while I deal with things. Not that my sponsor is ever going to find out.

I can cancel out the downers with some uppers and all will be fine. Since Reading Days are over, I can cop first then sell my books over at McElroy Hall to cover it tomorrow. I plug my phone into the car stereo and play Oxy Cotton by Lil Wyte.

After Pleasant Street, I start on one of the lollipops and it kicks in quick.

On Route 128 North my phone buzzes and it doesn’t stop. It’s Dad.

Oh shit, the latch.

I don’t read the messages and swipe the notifications away in anticipation of Chris’s response. I don’t really know what I’m looking for. I’ll never play Halo with Timmy again.

My phone finally starts ringing. My heartbeat quickens as I swipe past another message from Dad.

---

Reconciliation
By Leslie Michelle Nichols

They’re flea hoppers, my dad said, and I said, I’ve never heard of them, and by that time they had already covered the garage door completely and were coming into the house under the laundry room door. My father stood beside the dryer with a mop, pushing them back, but they kept coming, wave after wave of them hitting the mop. There were thousands of them, maybe even millions, all small, all dark. Advancing. They threatened to spill over the sides of the mop, and I built a levy of wet towels so they wouldn’t breach the kitchen.

My father said I was wasting my time because the wet towels would do nothing, but I was so convinced of my rightness, my ingenuity, that I built the levy around him anyway. My father said I should just get the broom, but I was angry because he had abandoned me, his teenaged daughter, to a psychiatric hospital earlier that year. He had abandoned me when I crossed the line into fantasy completely, believing someone was living outside my bedroom window. So, I closed the kitchen door behind him, pressed wet towels beneath it and stepped back, giving him up to the flea hoppers completely.

But they still came. They flooded the kitchen, drowned in the dog’s water bowl, coursed into the cabinets and sink in a mass of legs. I cried, overcome, and my father heard me from the laundry room and said they were just bugs, his voice small. He said they would be gone by morning, and he opened the laundry room door, scratching at the flea hoppers in his pajamas and his sparse hair, his combover. He was covered, his skin roiling, his eyes fixed and blue in his mottled face. But he bore it. He stood tall and resolute and calm. I wanted to run, screaming out into the yard, flea hoppers under my fingernails, but my father grabbed my wrist, told me I wasn’t going back to the hospital. He told me to get the broom.

---

Jessica Has a Brother
By Evan Laughlin

Jessica’s first year in high school was a dream. The start of her sophomore year is a nightmare. Because now her brother is a freshman, and he wears suits. Actual suits, like business suits. He also wears a necktie and carries a briefcase. To school! It’s mortifying.

Jessica corners her brother at home in the evening.

“I need to talk to you,” Jessica announces.

“All right,” her brother says. He closes the book he’s reading and turns to face her.

“Please, please, please,” Jessica says, “as long as we’re going to the same school, try to act normal. Make an effort. Once I graduate, you can feel absolutely free to go back to dressing like a lawyer. You can dress like a Benedictine monk for all I care. But right now, you’re killing me. People know you’re my brother, and they’re laughing at you so hard that they’re also laughing at me. You’re having a spill-over effect. It’s like social homicide, what you’re doing. And I’m the innocent victim.”

“I am genuinely sorry if I make you uncomfortable,” Jessica’s brother says. “But I must start as I mean to go on.”

Jessica’s fingernails dig into the palms of her hands. Nobody talks like that! It sounds like one of those dumb things her brother gets out of the huge English novels he likes to read. What kind of deranged ninth grader reads huge English novels? Other than the Potters, of course. She could forgive him if it was Harry who said the thing about beginning and going on (or at least she could have before J. K. decided to hate on the trans). Or if it was from one of Jane Austen’s characters. Jane is Jessica’s main girl. But no, he likes to read Dickens. And Trollope. Trollope!

There are simply no words.

It’s the fault of the parental units. Starting with their calling the little blister “Clarence” in the first place. What kind of chance did the poor kid have to turn out normal with a name like that? Nobody is saddled with “Clarence” except for like, a cartoon character and the worst Supreme Court guy in history.

Since it is the rents’ fault, Jessica heads straight to them for help.

“What I suggest,” Jessica says after she has laid out the facts, “is that you arrange to send Clarence to another school. One where he will be more comfortable.” Look for the school with the most dork-rich environment, she does not add.

Infuriatingly, the father and the mother laugh.

“Relax,” says the father. “Just let Clarence be Clarence.”

Jessica clamps her mouth shut to keep her words inside. Old man, are you deaf or stupid? Clarence being Clarence is precisely the problem. As she has just explained at length.

“This too shall pass away,” says the mother.

Jessica’s teeth hurt from being pressed together so hard. Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mom, go embroider a pillow.

They both talk as though it’s okay if Clarence turns her into a person who people point to and giggle. As though it’s okay if Clarence sabotages any chance she has of being asked out by a boy who’s not in the Chess Club.

But it’s not okay. Something has got to change.

Jessica keeps a low profile at school the next day. She eats her fruit-salad lunch alone in an empty classroom and tries to figure out her next move in combatting the scourge of Clarence. Voices from the hallway drift into the classroom. In between a slice of banana and a piece of kiwi, Jessica hears: “It’s so sad about Jessica.”

Helen’s voice. Popular Helen. Last year Helen was Jessica’s friend. These days Jessica mentally spells the name “Hellen.”

“Tragic,” says Mo-Mo, whose real name is “Maureen.” She thinks the hyphen is cool.

“Last year, she was slap,” Hellen says.

“Absolutely,” agrees Mo-Mo. “But not anymore. Did you see what she’s wearing today?”

“Hideous,” Hellen says.

Jessica looks at herself. The best tour tee ever (“Bloody Foetus,” Danish metal), strategically faded jeans, snug in the back, and peach Converses. Hellen and Mo-Mo gushed over the same outfit last May.

“And I don’t know what happened to her over the summer,” Hellen says. “I mean, I definitely don’t want to sound unkind or anything …”

“Of course not,” prompts Mo-Mo.

“… but this year she seems dim,” continues Hellen. “Almost stupid, really. Like the lights have gone out.”

“I think she must have had a head injury of some kind,” Mo-Mo says. “The school should get her into those programs they have for the intellectually challenged.”

“For the ‘r’ word kids,” Hellen says.

The sound of the girls’ laughter makes Jessica’s hands and feet go cold. The best and only course for her is to exit through the classroom window, disappear into a big city, and never be heard from again.

Then Jessica is shocked to hear another voice.

“The two of you are certainly in no position to criticize my sister’s intelligence,” Clarence says loudly.

The hallway quiets.

“Jessica tends to speak like an adolescent, but she is the smartest young woman I know,” Clarence says. “Whereas you are a pair of genuine half-wits. It’s not your fault, but you should try to make less of a display of it.”

Jessica is immobilized. A locker door slams shut. She hears mocking laughter, the way only boys can do. Then the chatter rebuilds. She doesn’t hear Hellen or Mo-Mo. At 7:25 the next morning, Jessica walks into the crowded school hallway with Clarence by her side. She wears low heels, an Ann Taylor suit she dug out of the mother’s closet, an embroidered white blouse, and gold hummingbird earring studs. Everybody watches. Jessica’s gaze dares anyone to make fun of her brother. A senior on the lacrosse team tells her she looks cute.

---

A Bird’s Eye View
By Juliet Waller

Here is my house. Here I am inside of it.

Here is my neighbor’s house. Here she is inside of it.

Here is my house. I am at the front door in an old nightgown. It’s 2:15 a.m. Here is my neighbor on the porch of my house in sweatpants and a t-shirt. Asleep? Hello? Yes, she’s asleep.

Here I am taking my sleepwalking neighbor back to her house. Prior to this we had mentioned the weather and said hello, but I do not know her. If anyone asked me on a sunny day, I might describe her as aloof. On a cloudy day, I’d say she’s prickly.

Here is my neighbor’s house. Most of the lights are off because it’s the middle of the night. My neighbor lives alone. My neighbor lives alone now. Several months ago, from my house, I heard arguments. The day after I heard an argument, I stood in my yard, and I asked my neighbor if she was ok. From her yard, in front of her house, she said yes, but she said it in such a way that I knew she wished that I hadn’t asked. When she went back into her house, her answer, that qualified yes, stayed floating in the front yard and turned slowly, like a cloud on the move, into a no.

A month ago, I left my house to go to my job and saw a moving van in front of my neighbor’s house. When I came home, the moving van was gone and the house seemed different. It seemed hungry.

Here is the inside of my neighbor’s house. I am inside the house with my neighbor. Most of the lights are off but I can see well enough from the spray of streetlights and the bathroom light, which is on. My neighbor grabs my hand while we stand inside her house. I look to see if she is still asleep and it’s hard to tell because her eyes are open. I look more closely and see that her eyes are open, but the lights are out. She is still asleep.

Awake, I don’t think my neighbor, who is prickly, would grab my hand. I wonder if everyone is softer when they sleepwalk. My neighbor leads me back to her bedroom, through her small home. I see, even in the dim light, the mess that is all around. Clothes, tote bags, and papers are piled on the couch, on the coffee table, on the one chair. There are plates on the floor around the couch which feels dangerous.

I wonder if her partner left because she’s so messy or maybe because of the prickles, but I have a sense that the mess is due to his leaving and the prickles will wear off now that he is gone.

My neighbor’s bedroom is in the back of her house, just like my bedroom is in the back of my house. The floor and the bed are covered in laundry but there is a small path to the bed and a neighbor-shaped space for my neighbor to lie in.

Here is my neighbor getting into her bed. Here I am pulling the blanket up to her chin. Here I am closing the door lightly when I leave.

Here I am on my way out of my neighbor’s house stopping to consider cleaning up a bit. I could start with the kitchen where dish towers rise out of the sink and sit on the counter, on the small table with two chairs. I could wash them, put them away quietly. Here I am back inside my house. I did not clean my neighbor’s house. If my neighbor wakes up in her house and remembers coming to my door, I want her to never feel she has to say anything to me in cloud words that change shape or soft words that feel prickly or words like thank you so much.

---

Supper
By Clara Fabbro

At the table, Beth and Susan sergeanted their blond husbands and combed-hair children. They wore the matching flannels of photo-frame stock families. Kat brought her roommate of eight years—also in flannel—and I didn’t bring anyone, though I’d said I was bringing Matt because when I RSVPed I hadn’t known. By the time I did know and ditched him, it was too late for anything else, especially a conversation with Beth. As punishment for my minus-one, Beth sentenced me to the spot between Mom, who kept shouting, “What!” and Dave, who had slithered out earlier and now smelled like weed soaked in cologne, so that I was being shouted at on one side and assailed by Acqua di Giò on the other. Beth’s oldest, sixteen, stared down at her plate, then swollen-eyed up at me, then at her plate again.

Matt had scrawled you’re too hot for your own good on a drink napkin and grinned, so I’d fucked him behind the bar, under the signs threatening a tow by a fake towing company. “Hey, Matty,” said Justin after Matt and I shameshuffled indoors, jizz gluing my underwear to my pubes, “can you cover my shift Friday,” and I ditched while they negotiated. I thought about morning-aftering but I didn’t do it. I morning-aftered coffee and a bowl of stale Cheerios. I was a little sore. I picked frost from the corner of the windowpane and thought: honestly what even are the chances.

“Pass the potatoes, please,” said Beth, and Mom said, “What!” and Dave unbuttoned the top button of his shirt to unleash new cologned skin, and Beth’s blond husband said, “And we’ll have to rewire the whole garage,” and the carrots swam in dill fronds, and I know. I know, all right. But everything about you boiled in me, ungovernable. After I puked, Beth’s oldest was the one to move.

“Come on,” she said, as everyone else sat like statues. She touched my heaving shoulder. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

---

HALF A WORLD AWAY
By Grant Segall

“Terror stuns a synagogue in ….” Crackle. “A grandmother and two …”  Hiss.

Papa tweaked the Kia’s staticky radio while I kept driving toward Akron Outlets for the Buckeye hoodie Vindu wanted. The news sounded all too routine these days to interrupt the sitar hour. Unless it came from home.

“… seeking suspects from Pakistan,” the announcer continued evenly.

“Naturally.” Papa rubbed his bad knee. “They can flee, but they can’t change.” Neither could we, it seemed, since I was still too Indian a daughter to argue with my Papa.

“… gunmen shouting, ‘Allah rules!’” I couldn’t help tittering. Nowadays, even people who hated the West talked like it. Or was a translator to blame?

Then the announcer found us out. “… Kol Israel, on Hayes …” There could be just one such place the world over—two blocks from school.

I jammed the brake and swerved into the turn lane. Papa took a breath. “Good idea, Jyoti. He should be with his own kind today.”

“With family, at least,” I ventured. At least the killers had picked a Thursday, my day off from the clinic.

I veered onto Hayes, squinting into Akron’s low October sun. “Stay tuned for further developments.” Then the sitars returned, their harmonies sounding too sweet now.

“Wait,” said Papa. “World Wizards.”

“Oh, right.” Long widowed, lately downsized from the lab, he’d perked up by prepping Vindu for today’s local round of this world geography contest. But the terrorists had mocked the contest’s theme of unity. “What time was it supposed to be?”

“He wasn’t sure.”

I slowed for a side road in case of barricades or rubberneckers on Hayes. Something hit the windshield. A leaf. The color of fire. I turned, and it slipped away. From now on, would Akron’s loveliest weeks remind us of terror? I’d thought we’d escaped it eight years ago, joining Papa half a world away, leaving my husband to follow after one more so-called rally. Akron had proved to be almost as diverse as New Delhi. Going by names and looks, a few of Vindu’s classmates could be kin to the victims and two to the killers.

The school’s driveway was lined with minivans and SUVs reclaiming their children in mid-day. I parked on the street. “Wait here, please, Papa.” Having gained a little American nerve since our swearings-in, I started striding past the cars. Someone honked. I flinched, waved, kept going.

By the door, Miriam Roth was hugging her twins. “Sorry,” I murmured, suddenly wanting more children again to protect and hopefully live on through.

“Then turn them in!”

“What?”

“Don’t you know them?”

“Don’t you know me?” I jabbed my bridal dot (really more of a talisman by now) and swept inside.

In the all-purpose room, the kids were sitting on the floor with their backpacks, squirming and murmuring. Mr. Dixon came up, smiling wistfully, leading my son. Blinking, Vindu let me hug him in public for once.

“We’ll all talk tomorrow, Doctor,” the counselor said, answering my unspoken question. “With an intervention team.” He cupped my elbow with long cocoa fingers and American ease. “You OK? And your Papa?”

“Sure,” I said, surprised by how comforting he felt.

“Hey, there was something else in all this.” He let go and shrugged. “Well, if it hits me, I’ll call.”

“Thanks.” I hustled Vindu away on a scary day to covet other mortals.

Outside, a few clouds were scudding across Akron’s fickle skies. “Doctor?” someone called. I clutched Vindu. Maeve Doyle was looming, an eighth-grader taller than me already, with brimming eyes and a brave chin lovelier for grief. Vindu gawked for a moment, then scrutinized his Nikes. At 10, was he old enough to be flustered by beauty?

“Sorry.” She pushed back her bangs. “About Mrs. Roth, I mean. We shouldn’t blame you all.”

“But you’re making the same mistake!”

She blinked, a child caught between grown-ups.

“That’s all right, dear.” It was Papa, caning his way from the car, speaking with an exaggerated Pakistani accent, posing as one of our lifelong enemies for her. Up close, he patted her cheek. He was young enough to covet beauty, it seemed, and American enough to touch it. “We’ll try to teach our people better.”

She pinkened, apparently old enough to understand older men. “Us too.”

“You’re Jewish?” I asked, more confused by this country than ever.

“No, no! Us Americans, I mean.”

Vindu squared his shoulders. “We’re Americans too!”

She positively reddened. Then she started to laugh, and we all joined in, united for a moment.

“Hey!” She touched something dangling from Vindu’s neck. A crystal globe. The World Wizards’ icon, which I’d overlooked in the confusion. “I bet your family’s proud.”

It was his turn to blush, though his skin hid it better than hers. “Thanks,” I replied, cupping his shoulder and leading my men away while they’d still follow.

In the car, Papa said, “We are proud, Vindu.”

“Yes,” I managed.

“Oh, I got lucky,” Vindu said. “They asked lots of that Asia stuff we went over …” As he went on, I started the car and thought about the contest’s coming rounds in Columbus, St. Louis, and Barcelona. Not that Akron had proven safe.

“No real Muslim would say ‘Allah rules!’” declared someone on the radio with a Pakistani accent, if I still thought I knew one. I silenced him and pulled away. Vindu swallowed and prattled a little faster. Did he know after all? Papa praised and prompted him. Heading home—our home now, anyway—I threw in a word or two, trying to help the young and the old along in my prime.

---

THE GOOD NEWS
By Shoshauna Shy

Tonight I tackle Kentucky. Get Amber and Jessie to bed, finish two loads of laundry, do up the day’s dishes, and study for my accounting class. Then I stuff a towel under the bathroom door so my voice doesn’t wake them. Sit down on the floor and set up my laptop, phone and contact logs. Patch the McCracken County Humane Society number into my Caller ID and click into the program.

“Ms. Darby? Is this Eloise Darby?” I say to the sleepy voice that reaches my ear. “Ma’am, sorry to call so late, but I saw your notice on that Facebook page, PurrBoost that Mimosa is missing? Your silver point Persian?”

The lady’s voice steadies with urgency. “Yes? Yes?”

“Well, I’m at the humane society here in Paducah, and he just got brought in.”

“He DID? Someone found my Mimosa?” Hope bursts into bloom like a lilac bouquet as she squeals into the higher octaves.

I study his description on my screen. “Got blue eyes, right? And two patches of brown either side of the nose?”

“That’s him! Oh, you got him! Everyone says those patches downgrade his pedigree but they’re what make him special, don’t you think so?”

“Oh, certainly, I do, and the way he looks at you!”

“And now he’s found and now I—”

“The bad news, Eloise. I do have some bad news.”

There’s a pause.

“The cops brought him in. He got hit by a car.”

“Oh, no!” she wailed. “How—how is my boy?”

“He’s doing poorly.”

A gasp.

“But we got a vet on the premises, Eloise, this vet just happened to come in tonight; normally, they don’t work Fridays but—”

“My Mosa? Can they save my—”

“The way he’s meowing, we think a hip must be fractured. Or both hips, actually. They recommend surgery as soon as possible, but of course that’s up to you.”

The woman is hyperventilating and blubbering. She’s beside herself. I can hardly understand a thing she’s saying so I promise we’ll get started right away. We’ll save her cat.

“But we can’t conduct surgery without payment, Ms. Darby.”

Ms. Darby leaps off the phone to open her laptop and PayPal me the sum of two thousand dollars. PetRescue@yahoo.com, I tell her, and bing! I see service@paypal.com drop into my email queue. The woman thanks me profusely through thick tears, God blesses me fit to beat the band. We part best of friends.

A knock on the door. Amber’s having a bad dream. I soothe and carry the warm bundle of her body back to the bunk, caress her soft skin till she falls asleep. I’ve secured November’s health insurance premium and now I’ll get us the rent for December. I kiss her forehead and creep into the bathroom.

Calico named Tasha. Almost midnight there in Bowling Green.

“Is this Lucerne Chillders?” I ask. “I’m calling about your Tasha … She showed up here twenty minutes ago …White paws and gold eyes? …Yes, yes, well, that’s the good news.”

---

Express Line
By Jacqueline Eis

I become her fast friend when I slow my cart and let her get in the Express line ahead of me. Her needs are obviously more urgent than mine: a grocery cart with a few more than the twenty-item limit, an overtired, fussy baby, its feet hanging out from the top of the cart’s kiddie seat.

She smiles, lifts the baby from the cart and hands it to me to hold.

“Do you mind?” she asks, but the kid is already in my arms before I can say no.

Depends on how you package it, but I’m impressed that she trusts me to hold her baby and is raising one who doesn’t scream at the sight of a stranger. That’s something.

Her baby looks at me with curiosity and gives me an almost elderly, wry smile that says, “Don’t worry, she does this all the time.”

“Paper bag?” the bagger asks her.

“Just one.”

I would have said please. I brought my own bag.

She’s a pretty enough woman in her twenties, already a little pasty and overweight, she unloads the Cheetos, the baby food, the canned spaghetti and spinach onto the belt. And Spam—you can still buy that?

It makes me think about the stereotype she’s living is just down the shelf from mine, nearer the floor, between the beef stew and the corned beef hash, but to be fair we’re both a little short on beef.

The baby nestles into my shoulder and pulls at my breast through my sweater. Good God, it wants to be nursed!

“No, no,” I say gently.

“Stop that, honey,” the mom says and smiles at me apologetically, but still doesn’t take the baby, who turns then and reaches for her.

Then she talks. As if I’m interested. “Those cinnamon rolls look so good but they’d be bad for my diet. I’ve lost five pounds this month. I drink water now, all the time. No more sodas. Even diet drinks bloat me up. I put on weight when I was pregnant with this one. Then the postpartum. I’m still too depressed to lose the weight.”

She sighs and shrugs, “And now, he wants to try again.”

Tears now, then a near-blubber. I hand her a tissue.

“Oh, thanks, I never seem to have one on me. Thanks, I’m OK now. My boyfriend is real good about it. The crying.”

“Any coupons today?”

“No, ma’am.”

I wouldn’t have said ma’am.

The baby squirms and reaches for my rhinestone earring. I still can’t tell if it is a boy or a girl. Not that it matters. There’s solid weight to a baby that’s different from anything else you’ll ever hold in your arms. It’s not at all like holding a puppy.

The cashier asks, “Are these Golden Delicious or Jonathans?”

“Jonathans,” she says without turning. “I’m over it now, I’m OK. My boyfriend was laid off, but he’s got another job lined up this week. We’ll be OK.”

Before the cashier tells her the total, I feel like I know as much as I want to know about her boyfriend, his cruel boss, what hamburger joint he favors, the color of his underwear, what high school they went to in Michigan.

She scrounges through her purse looking for another dollar, then tries to decide what to put back. I tell the cashier I’ll pay, just to add the difference to my bill.

“No fuss please.”

“Thanks, so much.” She turns to me and smiles with genuine, though practiced gratitude.

“Wanna’ trade?” she asks and I think for a split second she means our lives, and I’m momentarily tempted by her cute baby. But no, she holds up the loaf of rye bread I didn’t know had dropped off the top of my cart and we do the midair transfer, her baby for my loaf of bread, in enviable synchrony.

She concentrates then on getting the baby into her cart and the cart out the door. She doesn’t look back.

It isn’t the first time people like her have singled me out, the older woman, a listener, a mother-figure. She knows how to express her troubles, how to drop them at the feet of others, and how to keep walking away.

The baby turns toward me though, gives me a little smile that might just be gas, and I give her a little wave. “Bye bye.”

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Pill Organizer
By Toya L. Walker

The pill organizer arrived without instructions, which felt appropriate.

Lena turned it over in her hands, listening to the soft clatter of plastic compartments like teeth chattering in winter. It was heavier than it looked. Each day of the week was labeled, but there was an eighth slot at the end, unmarked. No color. No letter. Just a blank oval that seemed to absorb light instead of reflect it.

“Probably a manufacturing error,” she said aloud, because silence in her apartment had grown too thick, like overcooked oatmeal.

She opened Monday. Inside sat a single pale blue tablet she did not recognize. She frowned. Her prescriptions were orange, white, chalky. Practical colors. Honest colors. This one looked like it belonged to a sky she hadn’t seen in a long time.

Lena checked the label on the box. No brand. No pharmacy stamp. No receipt.

She almost threw it away.

Instead, she took Monday’s pill.

It dissolved quickly on her tongue, leaving behind a sweetness that startled her. Not sugar-sweet. Something softer. Familiar. Like the last spoonful of cereal milk as a child, when the cartoons were still on and the day hadn’t asked anything of her yet.

Nothing happened.

Or so she thought.

By afternoon, she noticed she hadn’t checked her phone in hours. The usual itch, the restless flicker of needing to scroll, compare, absorb, react—it was gone. She sat by the window and watched a pigeon strut along the fire escape, its chest puffed like it had something important to say.

“Who are you trying to impress?” she asked it.

The pigeon tilted its head, considering.

Lena laughed. A small sound, but real. It startled her enough that she covered her mouth, as if laughter were something that needed permission now.

Tuesday’s compartment held a yellow pill.

She hesitated longer this time. There was no logical reason to continue. Unknown medication. No instructions. No doctor.

But logic had not been particularly helpful lately.

She swallowed the yellow pill with lukewarm tap water.

That day, she remembered her grandmother’s kitchen.

Not as a distant image, but as if she had stepped into it. The smell of thyme and onions simmering. The radio humming softly in the corner. The way her grandmother moved, slow but certain, as if time respected her boundaries.

Lena found herself standing in her own kitchen, hands moving without instruction. She chopped garlic, sliced tomatoes, stirred something that began to smell like home, though she had never learned the recipe.

When she tasted it, tears came without warning.

“Okay,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Okay.”

Wednesday’s pill was green.

She took it.

The world sharpened.

Not in a painful way, but in a way that made edges meaningful again. The cracks in the sidewalk formed maps. The conversations around her on the bus braided into something like music. Even her own reflection in the glass looked … anchored. Like a person who existed fully in her own body.

At work, her coworker Mark asked, “You okay? You seem different.”

“Define different,” she said.

“Like you’re actually here,” he replied.

She considered that. “I am,” she said, and it felt true.

Thursday’s pill was red.

She almost didn’t take it.

Red felt dangerous. Final. The color of warnings and endings.

But she had come this far.

The red pill burned slightly going down, like a line of fire tracing her throat.

That day, she got angry.

Not the quiet, internalized kind she was used to. This anger had structure. It pointed. It named things.

She thought about the job that drained her, the friendships that had thinned into obligation, the way she had learned to make herself small to avoid being inconvenient.

“No,” she said, out loud, in the middle of her living room.

The word hung there, unfamiliar and electric.

She called her boss and declined the extra project she had been dreading. She texted a friend she hadn’t heard from in months and said, “I miss you. Can we talk?” She deleted three apps from her phone without ceremony.

That night, she slept deeply, without dreams that chased her into waking.

Friday’s pill was white.

Simple. Clean.

She took it.

The day unfolded quietly.

No revelations. No sharp edges. Just a steady, gentle presence. She noticed how her breath moved in and out. How her shoulders dropped when she let them. How the world did not collapse when she stopped bracing for it.

She walked to a nearby park she had passed a hundred times without entering.

Children played. Dogs barked. Someone strummed a guitar badly but earnestly.

She sat on a bench and did nothing.

It felt like everything.

Saturday’s pill was purple.

She took it with a sense of ceremony now, like lighting a candle.

That day, she created.

Not for work. Not for approval. Just because something inside her insisted.

She found an old notebook and began to write. The words came unevenly at first, then faster, like a faucet that had finally been turned.

Stories spilled out. Fragments. Memories. Imagined futures.

She wrote about her grandmother. About the pigeon. About a woman who found a pill organizer that changed her life.

She paused, pen hovering.

“That’s a little on the nose,” she murmured, smiling.

Sunday’s pill was black.

She stared at it for a long time.

Black was not a color her medications had ever taken. Black suggested endings. Or beginnings disguised as endings.

She swallowed it.

The day was … quiet.

Not empty. Just still.

The kind of stillness that feels like standing at the edge of something vast. An ocean at night. A field before the first snowfall.

She sat in her apartment and felt everything she had avoided for months.

Grief.

It came in waves, heavy and undeniable. For her grandmother. For the version of herself she had lost somewhere between surviving and living. For the time that had slipped through her fingers while she waited to feel better.

She did not turn away.

She let it move through her, like a storm that did not need to be stopped, only witnessed.

When it passed, she felt … clear.

Not fixed. Not perfect. But present.

Whole in a way that allowed for cracks.

That night, she opened the final compartment.

The unmarked one.

Inside was no pill.

Instead, there was a small, folded piece of paper.

Her hands trembled as she opened it.

In careful, deliberate handwriting, it read:

You don’t need this anymore.

Lena sat with the note in her lap.

The apartment felt different now. Not because it had changed, but because she had.

She looked at the empty compartments, each one a small doorway she had stepped through.

Monday: attention.
Tuesday: memory.
Wednesday: presence.
Thursday: boundaries.
Friday: rest.
Saturday: creation.
Sunday: grief.

She exhaled slowly.

“Of course,” she said.

The organizer clicked shut with a soft, final sound.

The next morning, she woke without reaching for anything.

No pill.

No instructions.

Just the quiet, steady rhythm of her own breath.

Outside, the pigeon was back, strutting along the fire escape like it owned the place.

Lena opened the window.

“Alright,” she said to it, to herself, to the day waiting patiently to be lived. “Let’s see what happens next.”

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Good and Faithful Servant
By Christine Venzon

With a “Whoa, Betty, we here,” Daniel reined the dapple gray pony to a stop in front of the office of the Picayune. He dropped from the cart and tied the pony to the hitching post. He checked the canvas cover strapped over the cart bed—all ties secure, the load hidden. He took a letter from his pants pocket, reread it carefully, needlessly. By now, he had it memorized. Murmuring a quick prayer—Esther’s prayer, which he’d found in his own Bible, the one he’d smuggled back from New Orleans on a trip for Mr. Prejean, the prayer he’d read the night before for courage: “Help me, Lord, who am alone and have no help but you, for I am taking my life in my hand”—he went into the office before anyone noticed him, a black man traveling alone on the streets of New Orleans. Not Creole. Not Mulatto. Not a Free Person of Color. Black.

The sallow-faced man at the desk recognized him. “Daniel? Prejean’s Daniel?”

Daniel took off his hat and handed him the letter. “’Mornin’, Mistah Landry. Mistah Prejean give me this for you t’ put in the paper.”

Landry peered, sighing with frustration. “Mr. Prejean’s penmanship seems to have …” He silenced himself. “Written in haste, no doubt.” He took the pince-nez eyeglasses from his vest pocket and fitted them on his nose. Squinting, he deciphered: “100 Dollars Reward. Absconded from Prejean Plantation, Tuesday last, May 25. Hannah, about 20 years old, 5 feet 4 inches, copper color, stout. Face marked by pox. Scars on back occasioned by whipping. Possibly heading to Plaquamines Parish, where she has children. Reward to be paid for apprehension and detention at a jail in the city. Masters of steamboats and others are warned against giving conveyance.”

Scowling, Landry thumped his hand on the desk. “Ignorant fools! Tell me, Daniel, be truthful now, doesn’t Mr. Prejean look after his own? You don’t look wanting for the necessities of life. Far from it.”

“No, suh! Mista’ Prejean gives us plenty t’eat, good clothes and shoes too. We gets t’ rest on the Lord’s Day and gets ham at Christmas. He does right by us. I mean t’ do right by him.” Daniel hung his head. “Them’s that leave come to grief.”

“You are well-named, Daniel, wise beyond your station. You are that good and faithful servant who will share his master’s joy. He will be entrusted with more and more. Letting you make these trips proves that.” Landry waved the letter. “While the worthless and lazy will lose what little they have.”

“Amen, suh! The Good Book say so.”

“Tell Mr. Prejean this will run in tomorrow’s morning edition.” Landry made a circling motion with the pince-nez toward the door. With the gesture, Daniel understood he was being dismissed.

Outside, Daniel drew a deep breath, blotted his sweaty brow. Heart pounding, legs weak, like he’d narrowly escaped a charging Choctaw hog.

Every word he’d spoken had been true. He, Daniel, was decently fed and dressed. House slaves always lived easier, received better, than cane cutters: no rawhide belts or woolsy-linsey greeted guests at the columned portico doors; no scurvied black teeth or fetid breath served teacakes in the parlor. They had their own Sunday church service, led by Mr. Prejean’s pastor, who helped them understand what the Bible said about the righteous role of slave to master, master to slave.

And Daniel did serve the family faithfully, and wisely, because—also true—the runaway rarely came to a happy end. The captured returned to whippings first, then shackles, or an iron collar, bells jangling like a sleigh horse at Christmas. Others were sold, and the label of runaway did not recommend them to the new owner. Of those never found, some, it was whispered, had made it up north. More likely they labored for someone else, starved and sickly, found goods being less valued, more expendable than those bought with one’s own money. Or they were dead—and who could say theirs was not the better portion?

In contrast, the written words he conveyed were almost entirely falsehoods. The woman was tall and leggy, like the herons that stalked the bayou. She’d never been whipped; like him, docile and hard-working, a digger of sweet potatoes and spinner of cotton. Her face, unmarred by disease, was dark as blackstrap, no more copper-colored than the dapple gray pony. Her children were up in Iberville Parish, not down in Plaquemines. She was, as best she knew, some 25 years old.

She would not answer to Hannah. Her name was Betty.

Even the handwriting was not Mr. Prejean’s. Seven-year-old Master Thomas Prejean had been so proud to show Daniel his new skills, making letters, reading words, as taught by private tutor. Daniel had absorbed these lessons, practicing on discarded receipts and mistress’s shopping lists, swapping the words Mr. Prejean had written with those in the newspapers he used as kindling in the parlor fireplace. But hands trained to build fires struggled with the delicacy of lettering. Mr. Prejean’s handwriting was fine as any gentleman’s, evidenced by the travel pass in Daniel’s pocket. After these many years, Landry no longer asked to see that slip of paper that gave him permission to leave the plantation. Daniel had counted on that.

One final lie: he was joining those north-bound, longing-to-be-exiles who couldn’t wait for the New Jerusalem, for the sweet by and by to share their master’s joy. And he was not alone.

Daniel slipped his hand under the canvas cover. “Hang on, Betty. We headin’ home.”

Beneath the canvas, five strong fingers squeezed his own—an amen, a hallelujah.

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