By Matt Russell

I’m in a canoe on an upland river. My daughter is on the bow seat, leaning forward, clutching the gunwales with her small hands. “Wonderwall” by Oasis is playing aloft in the breeze of a monochrome sky.

“Faster, Daddy!”

Penelope’s short brown hair is tied back in two stubby pigtails. OshKosh overalls over a pink t-shirt. A team of horses runs in the autumnal periphery. I dip my paddle to steer us around a shallow bar. We enter a narrow gorge and I look up and see unmanned construction excavators perched atop the canyon walls, long steel arms extended and cutting into the rock, causing large chunks to slide and plunge into the water around us.

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By Alice Whitmore

They were both white, both in their late forties. He wore an ivory panama hat and no wedding ring. She had shaved her legs for the first time in eleven months, had been horrified at the thick black hairs that violated the gleaming porcelain of the bathtub; horrified, too, by the salami-like discolouration of her pale legs. She’d wrapped up her shaved cankles in bright white espadrilles, the white was supposed to bring out her tan. Her cotton blouse was white, too; white underwear, white linen pants, white teeth that she always brushed after every meal. He was smoking a cigar, sitting at the bar, as he did every night, long strands of grey hair emerging like spiderlegs from the shirt he always left a little bit unbuttoned. He smoked but his teeth weren’t yellow, she noticed. Thank god. Yellow teeth, smoker’s breath: that had always been the one thing she couldn’t stomach. Everything else—body fat, sagging ballsacks, receding hairlines—she bore with grace, but she drew the line at poor dental hygiene.

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By P.T. Stone

There’s a swimming pool in the backyard. I’m standing at the top of the stairs, on the porch. The dirt is curled up around the speckled eggshell-colored concrete surrounding the pool. The three gumball trees that fell last October in the hurricane are still standing.

My sister is laying out in a lounge chair, reading a magazine. Her hair’s up in a ponytail with a scrunchie. She never wears her hair like that. She doesn’t read magazines. I wonder if that’s even my sister. Her hair is curly—ringlets, like my mother’s is in her wedding portrait. It’s not my sister. It’s my mother.

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By Alina Stefanescu

The 32-foot Catalina bobs atop the water like a red and white fishing lure. Distance increases scope while reducing size.

I imagine the boat as the upper portion of an illustrated graphic intended to help children visualize the relative size of an iceberg. To reveal how massive the iceberg when you peek beneath the surface. How huge the part you can’t see.

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By Mercuryman

They came.

Starting at the mid-morning slant of the summer sun, they gathered in quiet, menacing stealth. They slithered without audible disturbance through the shoreward swath of pale green salt grass. They hid motionless behind the wave-smoothed and storm-tossed lengths of drab-colored driftwood. They hunkered down. They watched. They waited. They made no sound.

The sun spun its majestic way zenith-ward in the cloudless reach of a beautiful azure sky. The day heated up. The elevated temperature became a palpable force. Shadows shortened apace with the steady approach of high noon. A brisk, cooling wind moved loose, white sand down the shoreline and then swept it back again. Still, patiently, motionless, they hunkered, they watched, they waited.

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By Billy P. Gee

I liked to hear the clompity-clomp of feet and knees on the floorboards, especially on the stairs, and I liked to see the legs of people in the room. From that level the difference between boots and high-heels and slippers is as different as white from black. One thing is the smell. The heels smelled of lady feet, rose water and sweat. Boots smelled of dirt and outdoors. I never liked neither so I galloped to and fro avoiding feet.

Back then I ran through the house on all fours. This was more years ago than you are alive, so you may not believe I remember now what I do, but I do remember. And what’s more, my mother told me long ago I remember it right, and so it must be true.

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