Troll/Librarian

by Julie Hersh
Image: Ambika Thompson

It was morning and there was a solid gloomy cloud coating the books and the sighing people at the long tables. The library was a big room. And not the kind that covers around you but the kind you’re always looking across nervously. The librarian behind the counter wanted to go home. She was damp from rain, dripping onto floors and books and curving wooden shelves. She thought: Libraries are like stacks of money in a wallet, wrinkled and soft and useful for something until they’re torn in two, when they spill their books over the side of the world into a hole and each half goes in its separate directions, fiction to the left or to the ground, nonfiction to the right or toward the sky, to rain back down later. Continue Reading

Pigeons

by Kristy Lin Billuni
Image: Flannery Bateman

Ava watched a city bus accelerate toward three clucking pigeons in the middle of the road. Their nonchalant pecking at the asphalt right up to the last nanosecond before total obliteration thrilled her. She gasped, and all three took flight, scattering to the right and left of the massive bus fenders, two landing in the gutter beside her. She rested the side of her face on the hot concrete, and a sharp pebble dug at her cheekbone. Continue Reading

A Kid Going By

by Ambika Thompson
Image: Tanno Pippi

A kid going by on his rollerblades

A. Spits at me. It’s unpleasant. Lands on my left cheek. The kid’s clearly congested. This is how the day starts. Sitting on a park bench pretending I’m doing something. Staring at birds. The budding leaves on trees. Anything to make me think of something else. Anything else. Or nothing at all. Try to achieve nothingness. Breathe in and out quickly. Someone passes me by. Asks if I’m ok. I ask for a tissue. The glob is still on my cheek. Continue Reading

Swaha

by Liz Kay
Image: Lita

I’d had my wish and I’d blown it out all over the cake.

But I still had the blue bucket. By the door next to the coats and shoes. It was bought by the seaside in the days when we used to play.

Last year Kevin rescued it from the garden, emptied it of frogs and filled it with dreams on sorry bits of paper wrapped up tight. Gel penned goals: see the northern lights and learn the ukulele. Write a novel and compile a facebook page of rainbows. I’d done the last one, had 1267 followers and counted 336 likes on my best picture so far. Continue Reading

Buffalo Manifesto

by Greg Burkholder
Image: Tom Moore

I remember laying in bed surrounded by buffalo. They licked my face, their tongues like wet sandpaper. The buffalo would impatiently nudge my hand until I flung my blanket off and trampled through my room with them. The carpet swayed like prairie grass and the walls stretched for miles. Time to infinity. I led the stampede through the endless plains of my room, as fleas danced jigs on the buffaloes backs and I laughed at them for being so dirty and they’d retaliate by kicking carpet dust into my eyes. I’d rub it off with the hem of my sleeve but it never all went away.
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