Adele Gardner – Cold Sleep
Cold Sleep (Inspired by the photograph “Cold Storage” by Richard C. Isner, included in the collections of The Mariners’ Museum.) After hours, this gallery is silent as the snow In Isner’s photograph of winter boats – As your blue lips, your mustache stiff with frost. You would have been my husband, But you’re trapped, frozen […]
Andrew Darlington – Three Enigmatic Epitaphs
Three Enigmatic Epitaphs (1) The Unbearable Lightness of Non-Being The doctrinal schism within the European caliphate was firming along a north-south divide, with the more hard-line Mediterranean mosques denouncing in particular the celestial elevator project, ferrying dearly-departed souls through the newly-opened stratosphere portal, across the Elysian Fields into the paradise of denominational choice. I was […]
John C. Mannone – Wormwood
Wormwood He goes to the only church he ever knew. The observatory entrance is littered with gum wrappers and cigarette butts. His mother’s King James, tucked in the folds, leathers his spring jacket. She insisted he take it—a worn edition bookmarked to Revelation 8. He shifts his gaze to the naked sky, it sparkles innocence, […]
Philip St. Clair – Secret Agent
Secret Agent A man is gunned down in a narrow back alley in Vienna, and his spirit is dispatched at once to the place such spirits go: a waiting room with benches that stretch to infinity. After the usual delays, he’s offered a family: Canadian, this time around, with a chubby mother who likes to […]
Rohinton Daruwala – Hand
Hand It starts with an accident – a careless kitchen knife slices open a palm, and as he yells and curses and waits for the nanobots to do their healing work, his head lifts briefly out of the sea of grief, then the wound closes and he remembers – Junaid is gone. But the healed […]
