“What do you want?” asked the nurse.
What did he want? He once had a house, but all he remembered was a tumble and then pain. Then he had lost it all: mobility, independence, dignity, his house. Now he was lost.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She often wept in mourning over a life she deemed wasted… unfulfilled.
She’d always had one singular purpose but at 43, that ship had long sailed.
Shame from decades of destruction and despair evaporated into rapture as she watched the positive result appear on the stick she’d just peed on.
For the Babies
—
Ten of us ate and ate, then ate some more. The bill was more than reasonable, considering the impeccable service, excellence and variety of food. The neat thing about dining at the inn was the nostalgic feeling of being at grandma’s house before the war. Stuffed, content, yawning with happiness.
Over the years Bob Thurber’s work has received a long list of awards and prizes. His most recent book is a collection of brief stories titled “Nothing But Trouble.” His first novel, “Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel,” was recently rereleased. Visit BobThurber.net.
Editor’s Note: Let’s all hope and pray for peace, not only in our own homes but in those places on the news that can seem so far removed.
The hospice nurse used an eyedropper to slip more morphine beneath his tongue. The whole problem was God. God’s absence throughout. That summed it up. God at the beginning, pressing dimples into your chin. God at the end, sliding his hand over your eyelids, saying, Shush. That’s enough for now.
The charlatan claimed to be able to read the bumps and dents on my skull.
He massaged and prodded, poked and stroked, then told me I was kind and stubborn, and just a little too sensitive.
What would he tell me if he could read the scars on my heart?
When the pain is there, the pain is all there is.
It’s hard to get out, to find the path, to find the way back to life, to living. We must ease into it, push back the darkness, find the light.
The path is there. It has always been there.
The key gleamed in his calloused hand. Behind him, a childhood of broken promises and long struggles echoed the hallway.
Marcus held his breath and faced the door. Years of backbreaking construction for Uncle, and turning cheek to easy money, led to this defining moment: a place of his own.
Go on now,
purse your lips
to the only addiction
you’ve ever had.
The ashes of what was;
better than our
last breakfast shared
in silence.
Let it rain and
ruin your white flag
while on grass-stained knees
I cry and beg
to gods who are either deaf or dead.
From the Midwest, Kacy Cunningham currently lives in San Francisco, where she is an MFA student in fiction at SF State.
She wasted her life watching her figure. Slimming down and staying fit were her full time jobs, consuming her because she consumed nothing else. Nothing but beautiful, empty as the calories she avoided. A double zero personality in a double zero casket. Smiling, for in death she only gets thinner.
Chris Griglack was born and raised in Massachusetts where he has lived for 24 years. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2012 with a degree in Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications.
Tonight, I’m perfumed. To you I am a shell. I am a template for beautiful paints. But I am bones, and ending, fast.
I thirst for touch beyond the surface. I want to break myself and show you my insides. Then I want to ask you, “Am I pretty now?”
Addy Evenson is a 21-year-old writer who writes magical realism, horror, and general fiction. Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as Prime Mincer, Bourbon Penn, and Curbside Splendor. She learns from libraries. She wanders the country, and writes to find home.