Tyson’s thigh is touching my thigh. Where our legs meet on the bench, the radiant heat from his body moves through the fabric of his pants and the fabric of my pants. It’s a strange communication, I think, taking the last gulp of my mason jar of sparkling rosé. Condensation has gathered on the bottom of the jar, and I cannot help but hold the jar in the final position of my gulp, focusing and unfocusing my eyes; seeing through the bottom of the jar, letting the dew obscure the image; watching the strange blobby shape of Evelyn’s flower, watching it dissolve into an even blobbier smear.
In Between Two Voids | Nahid Keshavarz, translated by Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
Darya is uncomfortable. Controlling the group doesn’t seem to be easy. She keeps thinking of Reza Sa’adat, and their last phone call where he said fear of death is perpetually with us, that sometimes we acknowledge it consciously and other times, hide it until it manifests in other things. The fear of loneliness and fear of death are similar. Perhaps if we can overcome the fear of solitude, we can overcome the fear of death as well.
A Return of Sorts | Gaby Edwards
We were five middle school girls in the Catskills, celebrating the onset of summer vacation with tick checks, crumbly s’mores, and the watchful eyes of one chaperoning mother. It would be the last time I saw any of them, except for Ariel. I was moving to San Diego in two weeks, which I guessed was the only reason I had been invited along.
Boys Club | Jack Donnelly
When I got to a certain age, though I was unaware of its certainty, my mother, with concern, took me aside and said, You are going to have to learn what I do, and have done, to know how to appreciate women in all of their habits and performances. It was too much for her to be a wife and a mother. I was only a son.
Kenyon Archive Report | Naben Ruthnum
Two years ago, a National Review piece describing Augustus Kenyon as “a somehow universally-beloved black Kissinger” elicited zero comment from the man or his foundation and ended the career of its author, Jurgen Schilze. Schilze works in industrial sourcing now, and we wanted to clarify that he is not either of us. We’re only mentioning him here to protect him from rumour and any harassment that he hasn’t earned himself. We—and we is the only way we’ll be identifying ourselves in this post—arrived at our idea to hack the digital lockbox containing the Augustus Kenyon archive after reading Schilze’s article. Not from Jurgen’s many borderline-racist arguments and his repeated elision of facts that worked against his portrayal of Kenyon as a ruthless manipulator, but from the shadows cast by gaps in Kenyon’s biography, the empty zones that Schilze pointed out.
Metric Birthday | Aley Waterman
The days are long and light so late. Ceremony is the faint lull of your roommate playing “Linger on your pale blue eyes” through a thin painted wall while you boil a kettle. The inside of a blue eye is like Iceland. Iceland is like a hot bath body with a cold forehead but you haven’t been, except in the airport. The Reykjavik airport is like a coffee shop.
Cigarette | Gemini Wahhaj
She watched him from the back, the red glow of his cigarette a lone light against the black sky. Sometimes, she went out to join him, hastily dressed in a cotton kamiz and shalwar, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. He turned around and gave her a smile with his stained yellow teeth, then turned back to gaze at the street below with his large, almond-shaped eyes.
Abscission | Jill McCabe Johnson
Suffocation rarely starts in a panic. Sometimes it begins in a drowsy state of not-knowing, the air warm and dense. Do something productive. Get out of the house. I grabbed the macaroni pan, went behind the barn, plucked wild blackberries till the pan brimmed.