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"The Way Home" by Ann Sproul
The clouds aren’t for me.
I thought, at some point, that they were, that I could carve a home out of water vapor, but I would only ever melt through. I would crash from the sky, and I would not be the pretty kind of shooting star but just the dying girl on your back porch. You’d open the door to smashed bits of tile and skin and bones, and then you’d put on that disappointed face and take me back home.
But when I was a kid, and maybe sometimes now, I used to jump as high as I could. On trampolines or on swing sets, I’d launch myself into the air and try to stretch my hands far enough to latch on to something.
"The News"
by Jake Goldwasser
I smoked what was left of my pipe and tidied my house. I thought about how alone I would look if a camera was hidden. I folded a few months of laundry and spackled the drawers. I gathered the cobwebs and laid them onto a plate one strand at a time. I imagined a hammock’s day in the mild sun. I twisted the clock to display a time I preferred. I brushed the green-gray scum off the tap that’s been dripping onto the dishes. I wetted the five clay pots that play host to my flowers. I padded the warps in the hardwood in the living room. In the distance, a slammed garage went off like a bomb.
"Selling Mrs G's"
by Elizabeth Cox
"Downstairs WC, just along here, toilet bowl wiped several times each day. Yes, wiped. Three times, at least. No, inside. Toilet brushes are ineffective, aren’t they, when you have hard water and a family digesting three fibre-rich meals daily? Not a tap of limescale on these thrones, the porcelain as pure as it was when Victoria Plum dropped it off. Here, give me a hand with the lid. See that floating bulb? Pristine. I’d never show that in another property, but nothing shines as the inner workings of Mrs G’s downstairs tank. Value added."
"The Cat Has a Smoking Problem" by Joshua Jones Loflin
It’s been obvious for weeks now, the butts piling up beneath the ficus’s leaves or underneath the bed. When I start finding them in the corners of the kitchen, I finally say something to Lauren. She sighs, says she’ll have a word with him. Asks me not to make a big deal over it. Says he only has one or two when he’s stressed.
“He’s a cat,” I say. “What can he possibly be stressed about?”
