By Harriet Rohner
Five floors of flashing dancers, the biggest Latin nightclub in the West. I’m here in my silver shirt when this skinny guy with a goatee taps me on my shiny back.
“Will you?”
“Yes,” I say.
Motel, 1992
By Greta L. Ode
A belated yelp.
I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge this establishment any longer (it has been twenty-five years; my apologies). This humble wayside, named after a Greek Goddess or Italian resort island, is situated conveniently on the wrong side of the tracks (the side with the best Mexican restaurant ever, six tables and an abuela, no waiting, and a country dance palace complete with all-night line dancing on two floors and a shark at every pool table), just off of Interstate 80 (or US 26, or NE 71) near the Scottsbluff (Alliance? Chadron?) town square.
1964
When Dawn saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan she understood what those women in her mother’s dirty books were talking about. Her life changed from sunshine and lollipops to a screaming fit of juvenile ecstasy more powerful than an atomic bomb. Bye, bye, Frankie and Annette. Hello, John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
Texts I Never Sent You
We’ll go for coffee—alright, decaf, if you must be like that, and I suppose it is late, and I’m an insomniac. I get in just before dusk at the top of Parker’s Piece. This coach reeks: someone’s missed the toilet, and now everyone takes a piece of it back up the aisle on the soles of their shoes.
Weighing Pewter
By L. Nevole
My dad is a geriatrician, so he spends a lot of time with old people. He’s a good doctor with a strong smile and a powerful voice that blasts through hearing aids. He married a social worker who worked in the same nursing home: Violet. She always wore a heavy pewter cross around her neck that dangled just above the edge of her cleavage—not that anyone ever saw that, with her modest necklines and thick, bland sweaters. It bounced against her bony flesh when she stood up or sat down. Her hugs were soft presses of her hands and the cold metal of the cross biting in.
Tenderness Upon Palpation
By Ian Artis
“I’m sorry about Alissa,” Mitchell said, sitting on the corner of my bed. I noticed his frame—gentle, but strong, like a linebacker who knits—made the fitted sheet in the corner pop up, but I was too sick to fix a pet peeve. I was too sick to anything. Listless in this heat, listless from this pain, in this old house with no air conditioning. [Read more…] about Tenderness Upon Palpation
