“Aaaaaaah!” I yell as Tess flings herself, beaming, onto my mattress, all giggles and smiles, her blond hair brushing my cheeks. “Mama!” She laughs. When Tess laughs, my heart wells up with joy, light and giddy with the love I feel. When the time comes for her to fly back to the U.S. to begin a new semester at the University of Wisconsin, we drive to Lisbon airport. And after every visit, as she proceeds to passport control, she turns back for one last look, and I glimpse the sadness and regret on her face. This time, though, the departure is different. “It is what it is,” Tess says, her suitcase in the hall. We are ready to leave for the airport. Fall semester begins next week. “What does that even mean?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. I just know it’s nothing good. Like it or not, and as hard as you may try to avoid it, the past will always catch up with you—an ugly hag clawing at your door, coming to reclaim what …

She picked me up one autumn evening in the Wien Reference Room of Columbia’s Butler Library. The year was 1940. I was beavering away at an essay for which, after a momentary glance at what I’d done (not much), she provided the thesis statement that was eluding me, succinctly formulated, even a little provocative, ready to be placed at the head of my shaky introduction, which she then revised with my pen. I asked her if she’d tutor me and she made me her lover. “She” was Joan Adams Vollmer, a sophomore at Barnard College and future common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, killed by his .38 caliber during a drunken game of William Tell eleven years later. “I” was a Columbia freshman teetering on the cusp of a world hitherto only imagined while reading naughty pulp novels from my father’s basement stash in leafy Brooklyn Heights. Joan looked nothing like the ideal of womanhood pictured in my post-adolescent mind’s eye, which I later realized had been assembled from the lingerie sections of store catalogues. …

Barricade the doors and prepare your materials. For the head, a clutch of cables stripped down to their raw copper cores carrying shudders of memory. For eyes and ears, a twist of coaxials and a flicker of fiber optics. Zip tie at random to provide an illusion of control. No mouth because you never spoke out even when you thought you might. Craft fingers from the cheap cigarettes you bought though split peas were cheaper and the soup would have nourished you at least a little. For lungs, a handful of the split peas you ought to have bought, closed up in a tin. They should rattle. For the belly, a wad of diary pages. Use gloves, they will be mucky. For legs, stack the contents of your worst-day bedroom floor, from books up to bottles. Determine that whatever direction they tilt is forward. For feet, use the boots, the ones that could coax a tango from a tilt. For the heart, an envelope to enclose the shadows you loved. Their subjects were only distractions. …

I worry about Charlie. Every morning, he complains about the drone rush hour noise. And he’s been getting worse since the twins left us empty nesters. “Isn’t it better than hearing the whirring all day?” I say. “We have twenty hours of quiet now. We can hear the birds again.” “Who needs all this crap?” Charlie presses his palms into his ears. “Breakfast delivered? Lattes? Newspapers! Who even reads the newspaper anymore?” He’s worse during the 5-7 slot for evening deliveries. Not sure why I answer. It never helps. “People like to hold something in their hands, I guess.” “What’s next? Milk bottles? Ice like in our great grandparents’ day?” Our phones ping like a string of firecrackers. “They have it,” I say. “Borden’s® milk.” A parachute delivery lands outside the window. “They’ve sent a free sample. Must use that NewGlass®, so it doesn’t break.” “More like Lizzy Borden” Charlie shivers, “It’s all so creepy.” His phone pings. “Lizzie Borden® milk! Jesus!” The drones certainly are spooky–buzzing 40 feet over the road in tight formations. …

She does not know he is there, sitting behind her, close enough to smell her perfume; out of sight, out of mind, as if still imprisoned in the dank 6 x 8 ft shit hole she sent him to eleven years ago. This newfound café with its restored Palladian windows, factory height ceiling, and industrial hardwood plank flooring, has become her safe space; her therapist had suggested incremental steps, and this one is working. Quiet and sparsely populated when she arrives. Mellow light streaming in, illuminating the grand Venetian plaster wall opposite in a Vermeer lead-tin-yellow glow. It all coheres. By mid-afternoon, when the lunch crowd has gone back to work, she focuses on her writing, losing herself in world-building. Only the soft hissing of the espresso machine, and wafts of aromatic fresh coffee grounds filter through. No one has told her he has been released. On a technicality. She has not received the requisite status update. This was never supposed to happen. She has spent the past decade putting her life back together. Shattered, …

A paper silhouette fades into the light. You move forward, carefully putting each step in front of the previous one. On the ground there are dirty papers lying around, pieces of plastic, and urine stains from yesterday’s pissers. The light from a clothing store illuminates a window, a little further away, where rigid mannequins set up an absurd vigil, in order to display some sportswear there. Finally, a blind wall blocks the alley that you have just taken. So you turn around, and walk back your steps leaving this dead end littered with rubbish. Once on the avenue, you actually find yourself stuck in a compact crowd of people, made out of a mixture of passersby, tramps, and seated folks busy sipping their drinks at café terraces. You walk by a few dowdy couples, which seem to be just out there in order to set up some sort of a competition, about who will turn out to be the most ridiculous of the bunch, in the end. This to such an extent that it could …

We were hitchhiking to Montana from Rhode Island, and after a few short rides with backwoods psycho-types, Cal and I got lucky. We got picked up by a guy in a big trailer truck who was going all the way to Chicago. His name was Sylvester, and he looked kind of like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. He was a former Black Panther. At least that’s what he told us. And he had Polaroid photographs of his various “ladies” from around the country all taped to the dashboard. They were all naked in the photos. Sylvester said the pictures kept him awake and focused while he drove. And he smoked a good deal of the pot we had brought along with us. He chain-smoked joints the way my Aunt Sophie smoked Winstons. Every half hour or so Sylvester would just smile and say, “Whyn’t you twist up another one of those fatties for us.” But, he was a good storyteller, and the miles flew by. Then, about three or four in the morning, Sylvester …

She felt a promising sensation reach for her core and opened her dark eyes with soft anticipation. She found his blue eyes not gazing into hers but into the upper corner of the room, up over her left shoulder, with a look of something like boredom mixed with purposeful indifference. All sensation fled. Later, alone, she sometimes wondered if it would have been better to simply have kept her eyes closed. Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.

Her English teacher called her Mousy, perhaps because she often wore a wooden mouse pin with red rhinestone eyes and a thin leather strip for a tail. She didn’t mind. The pin had been her mother’s idea of adorable. There was a lot of confusion in those days. Roman soldiers didn’t particularly float her boat, for instance. All the same, she wrote a story about two of them once, and to her enormous surprise, her teacher, a former Jesuit priest, now happily married to a former nun and teaching at her Lutheran all-girls school, was so impressed with her story, he asked if he could have it. She was flattered and said of course and handed over her exercise book, almost empty otherwise. Since she wasn’t interested in Roman soldiers in the first place and soon couldn’t remember what she had written, she was hardly going to miss the story. Not long afterwards, the school decided to let the teacher go. Some of his views were considered too radical for an all-girls school. This in …

Leaving school at fifteen was a mistake that I couldn’t undo. The teachers had predicted I’d fail every subject I was set to take and my theory was it was better to drop-out early than waste the next few months of my life working towards failure. I spent the following few months in bed watching bad TV shows and lounging around in my pajamas well into the afternoon. It was a perfect time and knowing that I’d somehow managed to dodge hour after hour of miserably dull school classes in exchange for these heavenly duvet days felt like I’d easily made the best decision of my life. It came to a tragic end in July. Around two days after my sixteenth birthday when my Mum came home after work and told me to sit down, she said, ‘You can go back to school or you can get a job,’ I slumped there in dull despair while she continued, ‘what you can’t do is lay around here playing on the computer all day.’ When she finished …

We’re getting rid of my grandparents’ cat, Julius. And when I say we, read my girlfriend, Sarah. After grandpa died, the family entrusted Julius to me, but his favorite game deals with biting the toes of anyone passing by. Sarah’s his usual target because her signature sandals leave her exposed, but he’s tagged my bare feet, too. “We can’t have people over,” Sarah says. News flash, we never had people over before the cat. Yet, her argument wins, and now, the animal rescue center appears on a hill behind a steel mill. The road isn’t even fully paved. The car’s tires bounce over every hole in the gravel path that circles up to the concrete pad in front of the building with a worn awning and tinted double doors. The cat crawls around the fabric crate my grandparents bought for him. His paws press through the bottom and into my lap as the whole car shakes, and I lift the container so that his claws don’t pick at my skin. My grandparents used to always …