When winter break came around, Noah and Jeffrey flew back to find their childhood home completely torn up. Boxes of kibble were scattered around the rooms, family photos were flipped over and strategic shits from Pernille, the pug, were everywhere. Jeffrey trudged through the mess while Noah checked the carpet, wondering how much it was going to cost to repair. The biggest change was Mama Z’s half-finished project of turning their old bedroom into her new office. Financial documents intermingled with signed sports star posters; a cherrywood desk was pressed against the old steel bunkbed. Their first warning of these changes was the verbal flurry they received on the drive back from the airport. The passenger seat had been off limits and empty for years, so Mama Z glanced over her shoulder at her now-grown boys squished in the backseat and tried to compress all the parenting she’d missed into rapid-fire life updates: “Never start a business, this ad campaign is going to be a total nightmare,” she said. “But at least the dog treats …

I will never be strong enough to hate you and your barbed wire arms swathed around my body. You sink splintered shards of sorrow into my asthenic flesh. It would take a love you’ve never had to will the sorry I’ve starved for past your chapped sangria lips. You won’t let me forgive you. I remember our first spring when stars floated around my eyes like lilies as you took my face between your hands and taught me that love was something to borrow. Love was slipping off shirts when you’d ask. Love was staying when you grabbed and threw me against the bathroom door. I’m a bullet casing without a gun to fire back. Your lies like mosquito stings I force myself to forget, tucking that shred of truth in the limbo of space that I wish I could keep between you and I. As we waltz in and out of the lie of forever, I wonder if I have ever been my own. Jia J. Johnson is a high school senior enrolled in …

Hosea came to his truth in March. He was the elder, his legs almost useless, and the farmland hives were dying. “I must be given.” As soon as he spoke, everyone roused from a kind of walking sleep. The community began to feed Hosea a diet of honey and water, bathing him gently and telling him old family stories. The farm’s remaining hives were raided and every last comb taken. The old man ate less and less as the days passed. Most of the gathered honey was stockpiled. The community lived in an old restaurant on the edge of the farm, over the hill from the hives. The members slept in the booths, in the stock room, in the kitchen. After Hosea could no longer walk, a broken freezer in the back was pulled open and cleaned. It was laid down and filled with hot lavender-scented water, then scrubbed again and again. Hosea began to smell of honey. He wept honey and that is what his bowels gave up. He’d been made clean. On the …

The plane began its languid departure down the runway, the whirring of engines abrading his ears. He looked out the window towards the clear path, an empty runaway unencumbered by thunder, rain, or even clouds. “Looks like smooth sailing,” he thought casually to himself. The steady movement was almost hypnotizing in its monotony. Without thinking he pulled out the photo, the last one that he decided to keep, from the back pocket of his wallet and looked—no, glared—at it. He felt fire in his temple, his brows furrowing. The urge to rip it to shreds was as strong and hot as the tears he refrained from shedding. I saw you there, like a whirling firefly against a pitch-black sky. You were dancing above the lilies that hung daintily along the pond as we watched the fireworks shooting from a festival far off in the distance. You floated there like you barely belonged to this earth. I thought that’s what I was searching for; I thought you (and I?) were destined for great things. The routine voice of the pilot thrust him out …

Eight minutes left. You wake. You don’t remember anything. The teary-eyed woman squeezing your hand says the Sun just died. Mere minutes until cosmic dark coldly cloaks everything you can’t recall. Six minutes. She says you were comatose. She says she’s your wife. But, despite a twinkle of familiarity, she seems a beautiful stranger. Four minutes. Your heart swells, a Red Giant. With the same woman you don’t know, you fall in love again. Two minutes. You imagine the marriage you’d like to remember for a few moments more. And connected to her you are a constellation. Eight minutes was enough time. Alex Rafala is an actor-turned-writer based in NYC. His debut short film, “Farewell Old Stringy” (Writer/Director), lauded for its full heart and exemplary performances, screened as an Official Selection at film festivals nationwide, most notably the 2014 Virginia Film Festival. His short horror screenplay “Harvest” placed as a Second Rounder in the 2020 Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, a Second Rounder in the 2020 ScreenCraft Film Fund, and a Quarterfinalist in the 2020 …