Volume 04: Field Notes
Barlow Adams
How Your Life Becomes a Reluctant Endorsement for Little Trees Air Fresheners
You’ll pilfer the contents of your dead mom’s glove box like picking the pocket of a well-maintained corpse.
Davon Loeb
Todd
Leaning his body against his desk, he was at me, again—asking me why did my elbows look so ashy, if I could read the words in our textbook, if I knew who my father was, if I could talk Black and those brackets, the colorful bands…
Molia Dumbleton
Righteous
From what we could tell from the back of the crowd, there was nothing to it but chance, and the odds were bad. Really bad. Two, was it? Out of all of us?
Eileen Frankel Tomarchio
Window Water Baby Moving: A Film by Stan Brakhage
Only months before my father will forget my name, he tells me a story about his time in the Marines, just after high school, before he met my mother. One I’ve never heard before, from when he was stationed in California.
Maurice C. Ruffin
November 17, 1994. 10:17 a.m. Kerlerec Street
Dear Future Maurice, Are you listening? Can you hear me? Do you care? I suppose you might think it’s a strange time to reach out to you as I stand here at a podium in the auditorium of our high school surrounded by two janitors, five administrators, 17 teachers, 513 classmates, and 1.50 x 1029 molecules of unpurified air…
Elvis Bego
Last Things
Tilney’s village is a cone of houses, a single spiraling street numbered up to 137, his own being number 39 close to the base of the hill. This year Tilney begins to forget much of what he once knew.
Douglas W. Milliken
Of Age (Caprice)
Comes an hour when even the cat can’t be disturbed from its mammalian nest of sleep, the night-blue of moon and streetlights through the windows the only hue painting these rooms, these unadorned walls and filthy, mop-foreign floors. A baby needs a mobile to ogle at.
Ioanna Mavrou
Dream Recorder™
As soon as I open my eyes the Recorder starts to talk, which I think is a design flaw. There is a ten percent chance that you want to beat up your boss, the Dream Recorder™ says, but I wouldn't worry about it.
Jami Nakamura Lin
Black Holes Primp and Mourn the Stars
Some black holes love chewing. Love that full-body crunch. How it starts in the molars and lights down to your toes. Other black holes love swallowing. Love not feeling a thing as it goes down. Love plausible deniability and a throat unscratched.
Tommy Dean
Height Determined by Distance
We’re in the car again. Dad drunk and playing with the radio from the passenger’s side, his knuckles bruised and swelling. He takes his anger out on the walls, often striking a stud, the drywall crumbling, the picture frames dancing, but hanging on.
Neil Clark
11:11
She hasn’t received a birthday card since her hair had color. For more years than she cares to count, she’s spent the mornings of her birthdays in the greetings cards section of her local supermarket. This morning, she picks out one that says, ‘Don’t Grow Up, It’s A Trap!’ She opens it and gets lost in the blankness inside.
J. Marcelo Borromeo
Pagpag
The bird had been ten years old. It was a common parakeet, but the store sold it as a lovebird in a pair when Mom bought it for Nina’s 12th birthday. They said that if one of them died, then the other would soon follow after. A week later, one of the birds died.
Edward Barnfield
Pool Toy Guy
Victor inspected the waters’ edge every evening, around sunset. The complex had three pools—the ovoid kiddie shallows, the central exhibition area, and a serious rectangle at the end, subdivided into salami slices to provide swimmers with some direction. Victor checked them all.
Joy Baglio
Box of Ghosts
You’re sixteen when the woman thrusts the box into your hands on the street, so forcefully that you catch it hard against your chest. It’s shoe-box sized and wooden, with a fancy metal latch.
Melissa Ostrom
Three Funerals
Justin would have had nothing good to say about it. On her way to the reception, Margaret mentally replayed the funeral, from beginning to end, stingingly, Justin-style: the director with his slicked-back hair (too Boris Karloff), the minister’s walk-through-the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death sermon (too pat), the time of year (a gross cliché).
Aram Mrjoian
Downhill
Recognizing the familiar exhaustion of sweaty tourists climbing back toward the parking lot, Frank, Jack, and Harriet ran down the steepest section of Sleeping Bear Dunes, allowing their momentum to carry them—breakneck, out of control—toward the endless blue of Lake Michigan.
Amy Stuber
My Friend Sela
My Friend Sela, The Writer, drinks her drink, pulls at one of her thin gold chains, each with a different charm: wishbone, gold S, gold pineapple. She picks up her phone, checks the screen, sets it down, says, “I read your story. It’s so good, girlie. I was totally in it.”