By Robin Jane Roff

As the evening breeze curled in from the darkness, Blair stood at the open window. The air was blessedly cool after the suffocating heat of the late August day. Goose pimples crawled up her arms as she considered whether things might have turned out differently, if there had been a critical juncture, a moment of rupture, a switch that might have been flipped from death to life. She drifted back to their last call. Had it really been five days already? The voice on the line was so normal, no different from the voice she’d heard all her life. The voice that had accompanied her to play dates and baseball games, to school dances and Sunday brunch. The one that spoke whenever she was unsure. The one that always had the answer and from whom truth was always certain. Had there been a hitch in the conversation? A pause filled with more than silence? Were there words that might have changed the course of time? Blair shook her head, breathing out a long, painful sigh. Where others saw a decision, she saw only momentum.

By Caitlyn Kinsella

They met while both wearing fishermen’s sweaters, escaping life for a summer in Maine. Her palms torn from handling oars, his cheekbones unruly with freckles. They met in a bar, when she asked for “gin, something citrusy, straight up,” and from the stool beside her he said, “That’s the most psychopathic drink I’ve ever heard anyone order—and I was a bartender.” 

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t remember asking you to drink it.”

By M.H.Emon

Every morning I sign my name to certify that today exists.

There is a form for it—Form T-0—printed on thin paper that curls in the humidity. I compare the world in the window with the world described on the form. If they resemble each other, I initial the box marked “Continuity.”

Today, the form is blank. Not “unprinted” or “mislaid,” just a white space where “Today” should be, the way open water looks on a map.

By Jack Feeko

Ian looked over the gunwale into the bay where the bob of his fishing lure swelled over the waves. He considered the sky’s thin gray clouds. To the east, he could see the white gable of his home crouching in the reeds so that its point was just above the water. He liked to fish in view of his home even though it was empty during the day. In a few days his son would be the same age he was when his father first took him on that boat, and his heart tensed at the thought.

The bob dipped beneath the surface. Ian got to his feet and began reeling slowly. His bare feet had worn the paint on the deck where he stood. When it was warm he did not wear shoes on the boat because it made him feel young. He yanked on the taut line and began reeling faster until the fish swam around the stern. The creature fought the hook, but the fisherman knew the fish was his. After a fight, he wrestled a black drum onto the boat. It thumped its powerless tail into his arm. In the prey’s eyes Ian saw the unknowable splendors of the deep sea, jealous for a moment that for every mile of land on which he could travel there were two more in the world’s oceans for the fish. 

By Reya Mehta

They’re almost done packing when the girl slips out the back door. The garden is overgrown, lemongrass spilling over the path, but she knows where to step—between the thyme and lavender, past the patch of dirt where the grass was yet to grow back. That was where they’d buried the robin last spring. She remembers the way her sister had cried.

She kneels by a patch of rosemary. “I have to go now,” she whispers. “We’re leaving in a few hours.” A fresh start, her parents had called it. They’d lost hope, she thought. They’d even stopped leaving the porch light on. For months, the beacon had burned until dawn, just in case.