Papa makes peppers and onions. He lets them get brown and slimy before he puts me in. The oil boils me up before I can feel it—not that I can feel it—I can’t feel where I begin and where the peppers and onions end. Papa pulls a wet sniff in through his nostrils like jumbo jet engines with black hairs bushing out. I smell so good, Papa says, I smell so good there in the pan. Papa breaks me up with the wooden paddle. He uses it to swat the fat flies away from my good smell. I leak my juices into the peppers and onions, and everything in the pan is wet. When they took me away, did the wet creep down Papa’s nostrils like jumbo jet engines, and get caught in the black hairs that bush out? Did the wet roll down his spidery red-veined cheeks? After they took Brother last week, I heard Papa in the house, tearing in two. It did not rain that night. Just a cold damp. I laid …

The early morning silence in the gas station is unbearable. It makes even the low hum of the fridge against the back wall feel like a jackhammer on my ears. My eyes glaze over cans of coffee in black and white and every imaginable shade of brown, searching for something to get me through the next ten hours. An unsweetened black cold brew should do the trick. I open the frosty glass door and reach toward the back of the fridge to get the coldest one. Only then do I catch a glimpse of something bright pink screaming for my attention behind the cans. Curious, I push them aside and pull out a bubblegum-colored milk carton. On the front is a drawing of a smiling cat with a milk mustache. It’s a carton of Miyabi Strawberry Milk. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these at a store. Not since I was a kid, I think. Has it really been that long? I turn the carton over, looking for the expiration date. …

It’s our first holiday together and you’re all excited because we’re about to take off, but you have no idea that I’m holding on to the armrests like I’m holding on to the earth, stuck in a cycle of intrusive thoughts, too afraid to move my body in case I move in the wrong way and trigger a catastrophe. As the plane begins to move, I turn to you and feel a sudden sense of dread rise in the pit of my stomach; the kind of dread I imagine a parent would feel for their child when sensing they were in danger, a dread which my therapist tells me is born out of a love stronger than the love I have for myself. Before it’s too late, I want to capture the feeling of being here with you, existing in the world at the same time. I want to tell you how much I love you, but when you hold my hand in yours and say, don’t worry, everything is going to be okay, there’s …

My first night in Morocco could have been different. Sitting in my riad, alone, I am staring at a fresh soup made from some vegetable I have never heard of. I smile, thinking about the woman I met on the plane. While my eyes are still reflecting those bright colors we don’t have back home, and my ears still echoing with prayers of this alien language, I hope that my stomach does not get upset by the tap water I drank, despite my mother’s multiple warnings. I try the soup, making some noise while eating it, as I remember that’s how it’s done here, and I don’t want to disappoint the locals. Or am I thinking about Japan? In between my slurps I hear a sound, a rhythmical tick tick, like water hitting a metallic surface. I look around, searching for the source of the noise but then I am distracted by the waiter who brings some delicious fried bread, which I garnish with low-quality packaged cheese. Shukriya, I say, although I will learn only …

The yoga studio I go to has a small paved garden at the back. Pinned to a window overlooking the garden, there’s a notice that says they are creating an urban wilderness. The best way to nurture a flourishing ecosystem, it says, is to stand back and let nature take its course. So far the urban wilderness is an empty birdhouse, a patch of nettles and what looks like a rotting Christmas tree. I joke that I’ve had the same philosophy with my garden for years. My instructor does not find this funny. She shakes her head like I’ve misunderstood something important, like she’s disappointed, like there’s no point even trying to explain something profound to someone like me. I feel her disapproval for months. She whispers gentle encouragements to everyone in the class but me. She praises someone’s Flying Pidgeon that is clearly nowhere near as good as mine. She walks past my mat with heavy feet, correcting my posture by prodding my shoulders a bit too hard. Sometimes I have problems with online …

My very first memory – I was three or four. My mother’s girandole earrings (I later learned it was pronounced “jeer-an-dou-lee”), with three green stones dangling at the bottom, the centerpiece slightly lower than the other two. Not Swarovski, but Jablonex, mass-produced behind the Iron Curtain in the neighboring Czech Republic. All year round, Mom kept them locked in a box wrapped in a handkerchief smelling of “Pani Walewska,” a fragrance sold in ultramarine bottles for 5 zloty (also the price of a Shane Nuss chocolate on the black market). She wore them only for New Year’s Eve parties. Dressed in a brocade gown trimmed with lace, with Mary Quant makeup applied to the eyelids but with her nails bitten to the quick, she let me hold them for a few moments before vanishing with a puff of an oh-so-delicate scent like a Communist-era Cinderella. No pumpkin carriage with horse-mice was waiting for her, but an Ikarus bus provided by the steelworks where she worked. The second – the age of unreason. I was six. …

“I know you know a lot of musicians,” he says out of nowhere as we’re hugging goodbye. “But I want to sing at your funeral.” 

He’s strangely insistent and repeats himself twice.

 Oh, good god, I think. Because while I’m quite ill, my death isn’t imminent, he hasn’t sung professionally in decades, and he’s getting worse—now he’ll even make my last hurrah about himself. 

 I want an alternate reality, a better one, where he’s just the kind guy who’s my close friend and not somehow this stranger, as well. 

But his moods keep pivoting faster than a cheetah on Dexedrine and his fits of grandiosity are ballooning like a Macy’s parade float gone rogue. 

Later that night he sends a 15 paragraph email comparing himself to Bob Dylan. 

I reply, “I love you, but you need some fucking help.” 
 I sleep for a little while and wake up at 3:00am exhausted. 

I know he’ll ignore me again. 

In the morning I wake to a 20 paragraph email in which he’s now both Placido …

Sending you a prayer all the way from a memory of lovers on a beach in the middle of the Pacific waiting for the sun to fall, waiting for sea levels to rise. There is a bar in Kihei on that same Pacific island where we eat fried food with the burnouts and alcoholics. Drink a cocktail. Have some fun. Sending you a prayer from my backyard in Albany, CA. How is the weather in Amsterdam? How late does it stay light outside in the summer? Where have all the people gone? Do you go to Bruges the way that I want to go to Bruges? Does Colin Farrel’s ghost wander the streets? I pray for you while I walk the canals with the boats’ low grumbling across the water. The very small wakes they leave rippling behind them. The tall Dutch men, the blonde Dutch women. They drink icy riesling by the bottle. Oh how I’d love a glass of icy riesling from the bottle with you in a boat while we gently motor …

Your father died an hour before you were born. There was a lot of screaming that day. Your mother, air hissing through her clenched teeth and hands grasping at empty air, pushing while surrounded by white walls and the bitter smell of antiseptic. Garbled words of a foreign language grabbed her by the cheeks and shook her. There was no familiarity in this cold hospital. No family waiting outside for her. Only two nurses and a supervising doctor clad in white who watched through deep set eyes as she struggled. She was only twenty, and the stack of her two decades seemed pitiful in the grand scheme of things. Four miles away, your father’s car sped through a red light. It was promptly t-boned by a semi and flipped twice in a blinding arc of light and screeching metal that momentarily lit up the night. Stained pieces of baby blankets, a stuffed bunny, and his body were among the things scraped off the cold concrete. Later, your mother told you his death registered as a …

They sprint up the dusty stairs. Nestle their bodies into a damp bed where he strokes the mole on her left hip as she kisses his YOLO tattoo. Soothing familiarity. After twenty-seven years they love each other just as much as they love their spouses, but not more. Not yet. Julia McNamara is a working-class writer and poet from the wilds of rural Cork in Southern Ireland. She received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick and is exceptionally skilled in the ancient Japanese art of Tsundoku.

Counting photos, I have three or four. First, a picture of sea stars, purple and glistening, then a field of flowers—both of which I’ve framed. Then, there’s the same family pose: just our heads, mine barely in view, my son and husband making faces, and they wonder why I never frame it or place it on my desk at work—why they’ve been replaced by sea stars and a lone flamingo at the zoo. “Can we please try?” I beg, but the effort is just the same. Strangers have offered to take our pictures on vacation, but a stranger’s gaze will always be a stranger’s gaze: temporary generosity, the lighting off, a blurred line, my hair whipped into a frenzy, the stain I didn’t know was on my shirt. But then, I’d heard that families were snapping photos on the ferry, timed just right with an orca pod, down the strait at around 8 a.m. on Sunday, so I booked a trip. Melvin, my husband, and Ross, my son, wander about, looking for tater tots or …

1: “The heart can continue beating even when disconnected from the body.” Our stepmother Angel’s scarlet fingernail hovers above the page as she reads to us. My sister and I, sleep-eyed and curious, watch her intently. Then, Angel snaps the book shut, gives a dramatic yawn, and drifts off to bed. 2: “Tomatoes contain lycopene, which is good for the heart.” At the pizzeria, Dad orders a Neapolitan, makes a sad face with the tomato crescents, watches us eat. Later, we stop by the butchers for that nice jam. “Unbreak My Heart” comes on the radio and Betsy, the checkout lady with cinnamon curls, turns up the volume and winks at him. It’s the first time I’ve seen Dad smile since he and Angel separated. 3: “A man’s heart is bigger than a woman’s.” I read this fact aloud to Angel as she cleans the bathroom. “That’s clearly a lie,” she declares, rolling her eyes, says “you know the spider that lives behind our toilet? Well, your father’s heart is smaller than that spider’s tiniest …

Raindrops fall like knives, hitting the roof. It’s been coming down in sheets for days now, while Mom sobs and Dad tells her she didn’t need the job, anyway. It was just making her tired. Puddles in the yard separate me and my sister from the lake, and Dad says the last thing Mom needs is a muddy floor, so we don’t play in the puddles or go outside—and Dad says the lake’s no place to catch the lightning, when he sees us wrapping aluminum foil around a cardboard paper towel rod. We tell him we’ll be quiet. We’ll leave our shoes by the door, but he hands us sheets of paper, and we draw the rain for hours, coming down in slants, making boxes out of horizontal lines: Mom in the kitchen, Dad with us on the other side of the house in the living room, the lightning splitting the difference, making a box of us all. The rain slows down to something like pellets, and Mom is singing now, and the kitchen smells …

My toes may have been hurting already when I stepped out of the taxi, but I do not remember. All my attention was away from my flower-patterned shoes. I was focused on the composure of my back, the regality of my neck, on faking a calm breathing so the porters at the Plaza did not notice my reverence, my choking anxiety, the deep canyon of ecstasy parting the chambers of my heart. I pushed the revolving door with the talon of my hand wondering if, in a parallel curl of the infinite universe, Grace Kelly was doing the same. But I am sure that even in her most inelegant days, the laziest porter would have opened the lateral door for her and her halo of Chanel No 5. I stood stoically in the lobby, trying to guess the bar domains beyond the tall floral arrangement on the centered round table. I thanked my five-inch heels that allowed me to get a glance of the solemn stained-glass ceiling through hyacinths and oriental lilies without stretching my …

She saw him almost every night. Not just him, of course, she watched all of the cast. She also had to keep an eye on the audience and blink her torch at people talking or on their phone. Sometimes she had to tell someone to stop singing along. That was the worst. But she saw him, knew all his scenes, his lines, each turn, each smile. It was easy when the stage lights flooded his every movement and they were so big and exaggerated that even the people in the cheap seats could see them. The first couple of times, she hadn’t seen him at all. It had been seamless but after a few more times, she knew what to look for – the little head nod he gave himself before he walked through the audience to make his grand entrance, the beginning of an exhale as the curtain fell on the first act, that last smile after the cast all bowed. He was handsome as all leading men are but that wasn’t the reason …

There is a cat in the doorway. She stares at you. You stare back. Neither of you move. # She maintains eye contact with you and blinks slowly. Cats are said to be majestic beasts. Royalty, even. Goddess Freya led a chariot of cats into battle. Ship-cats brought good luck to a voyage. Your moms talked about a cat who would sleep at the foot of people’s beds before they died. Intelligent, graceful, light on their feet, fierce hunters. Just yesterday, you watched this cat walk into the leg of a dresser. Then again. Then a third time until she finally changed her trajectory a little to the left. Whoever said royalty had to be smart? # Her tail flicks against the ground. Throughout your whole life, tail wags meant friendship, but you learned fast that cat lingo is unnatural. Maybe she’s happy to see you and will let you pass. Or perhaps she’ll slap you in the face. Or hunt your long, fluffy tail. Her favorite game. Through the silence you can practically hear …

It’s amazing the amount of drivel that fills a TV screen after 1 a.m. Stephanie thought to herself as she pumped the channel button on her remote and watched a series of dismal choices roll by. This was no trivial matter. She had always had a problematic relationship with night time silences, and so finding the right distraction was essential. Several decades earlier, she could overcome the night through the strains of New York City’s last great progressive rock station. She spent so much time listening to one overnight DJ that the two of them used to exchange Christmas cards. Somewhere along the line though, the radio lost its magical nocturnal powers. The rock station went Top 40. The sports talk station that replaced it on her playlist was a constant reminder of the failings of the only sports team she really cared about. Eventually, she had abandoned the radio and returned to finding nocturnal solace the way she had when her anxieties were fewer and her life experience shorter— late night television. Of course, …

Kristina removed the letter from her apron pocket and gingerly unfolded it. She had read its contents often enough that the paper was already starting to fray at the edges. If she closed her eyes, she could see the words in front of her. But, they were still like so many snowflakes melting on contact. She shook her head as if to dislodge whatever was affecting her usually sharp perceptions. Her education to this point had been less than formal, but it had enabled her to sniff out the liminal spaces between what is said and what is meant. She had learned these lessons while eking out a living in this guesthouse, where the owner was happy to turn a blind eye to her age in exchange for untold hours of cheap labor. Till now, it was an exchange Kristina had been happy to make. Yet, she feared the heightened sense of what is not said that she learned within these walls had somewhat dulled her responses to plain words. Or, perhaps she was just …

She patiently lies on a blanket of marble. Her shot mother’s face on a bodiless skin splayed out on the floor beside her. Still as the other exhibits which adorn the room. Extensions of a two-legged ego. Her motionless tail pretends: I have forgotten who I am. Her silent lips reassure: You are my father. You are my master. As a chunk of death is tossed her way the metal arm that holds her chain wriggles like blades of grass in the wind. An emerald paradise that for two tiny months had belonged to her. She knew it never would again. Self-emancipation always had a cost, and the world had so many guns, and so many people who were yearning to use them. But she would rather die as a tiger, than as his plaything―and leaping above into a higher air, she makes a first and final kill. Amy Akiko is an educator, artist and writer from South London. Her writing predominately gravitates towards the themes of nature, love and (all too often) heartache, and …

He watched the train come into the station, little flashes of blue electricity snapping on the overhead wires as it hissed to a stop. He waited for passengers to get off before he swung himself up the step and entered the car. It was early evening and he was tired, it had been a long day already. He shook his wet coat in the aisle before selecting a seat, then tucked it in the overhead slot and sat next to the window. He looked at the station lights, deep haloed orange, until they passed into the outskirts of town, under a bridge picking up speed and then the last houses gave way to fields and neat parcels of forest. Rain was streaking across the window, shivers of wet trails that pooled, then formed little rivers at the edge of the glass. He stretched his legs before opening the newspaper and placing it on his lap. The paper he had no intention of reading, preferring instead to stare unfocused on the passing landscape, one he knew …

B, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Do you remember that night on the retreat, where we stayed up late sitting out on the porch? The kids were all asleep. Do you remember how everything felt alright for a while? The stars were out. It was the first time I had seen them since I moved to the city. We had only known each other for like three weeks. I’ve been thinking about everything that came after. Making love in your room under the glow of your Christmas lights. How you cried and I held you until you stopped shaking. Our argument in the park, and how I apologized and how it wasn’t enough. How all around us were people enjoying themselves, skating and playing volleyball, happy. But on that night, we were close. We were in it together. You put your chin on my shoulder and cried because the day had been so hard and we hadn’t had time to breathe. And you hugged me and it was like we were one for …

The sugar glider took a few halting steps in the box, trampling a typed note. The few people Ronald knew wouldn’t leave an animal on his doorstep. Perplexed, he picked up the sheet of paper. “He was too much work for us. The exotics shelter was full. We know you’re a trustworthy person.” Though the note was unsigned, this moment seemed to bulge with fate. Ronald had never had a pet before, much less a sort he’d only seen in pictures — never thought he could justify one, the work, the expense, mostly the downright self-indulgence of demanding something love him. But now the responsibility had been given him, and he would care for the wide-eyed little creature wholly. He cupped tender hands around the sugar glider. It lifted too easily. Ronald turned over the hollow animal. There was a battery compartment. He dropped the lifeless thing. Two teenagers giggled. Ronald glimpsed too late the camera of their mobile phone lowering, and the youths darted down the street, laughing at their prank. So quickly had …

Homage to “Gas” by Edward Hopper Today we should think of what a dented orange gasoline can would look like somewhere on a road in New England. It is sometime in the 1940s and it is Halloween and there is a blue and white gas pump at the filling station where the can sits next to a yellow wooden rest room. It is Halloween night on a country road and the office window is open and there are soft waves of big band music coming out of the large brown radio next to the red cash register. We should recognize the thundering paper as cavernous empty old shopping bags. Five children have already cried Trick or Treat! The manager smilingly dumps heavy clusters of candy into each child’s bag, echoing the kettle drum from the jazz orchestra while his helper augments the effect by giving the empty gasoline can several rhythmic taps. The brightly lit office is a gigantic geometrical owl and the children follow their father’s flashlight as it slices up the breezy black …

It happens in a flash, a blip on the screen of life. The first day the numbness wraps itself around your chest, compressing until the last gasp of air escapes from your lungs. Rational reasoning does not quell the loneliness, and your memory tumbles backward to deter the coming of tomorrow, to protect against the present, to preserve the past, so the truth does not consume you, never to listen to the words of encouragement, endearment, or the flippant teasing of your weaknesses which brought a smile on a sullen day. You attempt sleep, but the sadness evaded for the moment slams you in the face with its cold, hard fist and you cry out, even with the knowledge that this time comes for everyone. Celebrate the life, you tell yourself, a life filled with hardships but outweighed by the joy of being surrounded by love. The light of a brand-new day welcomes you, reminding you the invitation does not extend to everyone. You struggle through the kind but meaningless words of those who knew …

As I walk down the alley, torn tights under my umbrella, I ponder how I look to passersby on the street. Split-second decisions are the best decisions. I suppose, even if only best in the moment. But each moment is all we have. The street juts out from the crumbling alley. Streetcars pass alongside me like ghost ships through heavy fog. The same fog fills my brain. I try to clear it, lay a hand on something concrete, something simple and true. Something logical. I need truth, one truth. But there are too many. Addiction. Those afflicted with what they once began and now regret. Billowy drug addicts. Philandering men and women out in the nightclubs, when it’s dark enough to hide themselves between streetlights. Those who are so burdened with a mind of strong idealism they can’t let go of what they hoped was real. Yes, I was addicted. A memory, unwanted. From the party. “Do you drink a lot?” I hesitate before I answer. “These days, yes.” “You shouldn’t drink. It’s not good …