By Jackson Freud

My doctor believes a trip to the zoo will cheer me up. He buys me hotdogs and ice cream and encourages me to at least try to engage with the hundreds of animals on display.

“Don’t you like it here, Jarrod?” Doctor McCarthy says, stopping at the lemur enclosure.

I tell him no, I would rather be at home researching my symptoms on the Internet.

“What is it this time, son?”

“Chemtrails, doc,” I say. “Did you know we’re all being poisoned by those white streaks up in the sky? The one’s left behind by aeroplanes.”

Doctor McCarthy tries to lure one of the lemurs over by holding out a handful of potato chips. I beg him to stop. The thing might be rabid.

[Read more…] about Kingdom of Animals

By Ian Strangway

We were hoping for a theory of everything. Best case scenario we thought we would get a nice set of equations in perfect agreement from quantum mechanics to general relativity. We never anticipated the power of our theorems: the beauty and elegance of the raw truth.

Math is a tool to express relationships. If you change one thing how will that affect other things? If you expand that idea and apply it to larger systems, you can make simple predictions. If I’m running this fast will I escape the man-eating lion or not? Basic relationships and simple predictions.

That’s it.

[Read more…] about Theorem of the Deceased

By Elizabeth O'Brien

It all glittered. Her hair, her movements, the edges of her arms and top of her head. He watched her seem to float above the ground, the dress swirling movie-like, and thought, glitter is just plastic cut extra small, static charged. From his fast food booth, also plastic in unctuous pink and orange, he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He could only watch her like some rerun out there, her laughing and flitting beneath the streetlights out the window, and he’d seen it before, hadn’t he seen this before?

Also, the pizza was terrible.

[Read more…] about Seen This Before

By William Masters

Ever since Damon Edward Albert Dawson III, CPL, US Army, DOB 1989, (awarded the Afghanistan Campaign Medal and the Army lapel pin for good conduct) returned from his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, he could not leave his apartment without a list.

Checklists had become mandatory for survival at the front: inspect the tires on the Humvee prior to leaving for patrol; confirm a full gas tank; refill any missing supplies to First-Aid Kit; reload any missing ammunition; test personal communication devices; confirm the current communications password for the day: Alpha, Tango, Whiskey. Or was it Papa, Yankee, Zulu?

[Read more…] about Clear

By Clara Ray Rusinek Klein

Boarding the streetcar, we don’t speak. A man in a black pinstripe suit sits against the back window, newspaper spread on his lap. He glances as we walk down the aisle, holding hands, not daring to look at each other.

As the streetcar lurches forward, my wife grips her purse, knuckles white. Sweat blooms under my fedora. It occurs to me that I’d look more natural with a newspaper, like the man in the pinstripe suit.

[Read more…] about Eine Zeitung / A Newspaper

By Joseph Sloan

You buy too many flowers. You have to. They are luscious, spilling out of their vases in the center of Griffin’s Market, and you gather them in your arms until you can’t hold anymore. You imagine the other shoppers watching from behind their grocery lists, smiling and thinking: “Now there is a young lady with a Valentine!”

[Read more…] about Valentine’s Day