Knocking At The Gate

Writing in X-Ray Literary Magazine , Curtis Smith connects a great many feelings in only six paragraphs. Here's the first: You stop at the market after work. This Tuesday, that feels like a Thursday, these speeding years and forever days, and, short of death, there’s no end in sight. The weekends where all you want to do is sleep. The vacations you can’t afford. You’re here for dinner, although cereal feels like a saner option than making one more decision. A song plays, and here you are, adrift on a marketer’s algorithm, taken back to your teenage bedroom, and what would that girl say if she could see you now?   Full text of "The Song In Your Head" here.

In X-Ray Literary Magazine , Quinn Forlini's "After Not Leaving The House For Three Days" describes how Anna and her mother at last went for a walk:  Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery.   She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more. Full story here.

Writing in X-Ray Literary Magazine , Megan Garwood's one-paragraph short story features grocery shopping, groping, wildlife, age, and worker solidarity. At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. Full story here. 

The Hugo Award nominations for 2022 include a short story by Blue Neustifter that was originally presented as a Twitter thread from Bi Dyke Energy (@Asure_Husky). She covers a lot of ground quickly and deftly: agency, identity, time travel, gender, self-affirmation, causality, regret, technology, triumph, and spirit. "Unknown Number" by Blue Neustifter

  Nicasio Andres Reed in Reckoning : He turns the corner onto S Bonsall St. The sidewalk is broken in all the same spots he didn’t know he knew until he sees them again, and then he knows every fissure and crack, every dog paw immortalized in wet cement. No parked cars. A lot more boarded-up doors and windows than there used to be, although there’d always been some. There were never any front yards in the neighborhood, all the basement windows looking directly out onto the sidewalk. Now every house on the row that still looks occupied has a rain barrel out front, and a couple have one of those larger, galvanized metal cisterns that look like fat little grain silos. There’s a line of grass growing right down the middle of the street. Sedge, probably—a bad sign on what used to be high ground. And then, inevitably, there’s #2017. He’s been gone almost twenty years and it looks . . . not the same, but like a faded photograph of itself. Gino doesn’t know if it’s looked like that for a ...