by Elizabeth J. Colen and Carol Guess
If trees could talk, you said. If they could tell us what they saw.
But if you didn’t want to talk about it, why would a tree?
We walked in the arboretum as if nothing had happened. Past Japanese Maples, Witch Hazels, Legumes. Through Pinetum and across the stone footbridge. The math of it, was what you said. Continue reading
by Khem K. Aryal
1.
Most boys in the town of Kalikanagar grew up into full-blown men at the age of fifteen or sixteen. But Chintamani Pandey found one day that his son—already eighteen—had stopped growing a couple of years before—not so much physically, but otherwise; the boy’s peers had left him behind.
Some of the boys drove public buses, and the drivers treated their assistants like ten-year-old kids—some of them really were ten years old. Some managed their fathers’ shops, and the customers called the boys sahuji, respected shopkeeper; some of the customers even called the teenage boys dai, older brother, although the customers might have grandchildren the shopkeepers’ age. Some boys helped the drivers wash their TATA buses and Mahindra jeeps in the nearby stream, and some repaired radios. One was even a painter who’d put a sign in front of his shop: Kanchan Arts, in English, cursive fonts—Kanchan being his wife’s name—and wrote signboards and banners for political parties. Some others who didn’t have such involvements—those unlucky souls—formed local gangs, readily waiting to call anyone a motherfucker for no reason and start a duel, and to sell themselves to political parties during elections. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Drew A. Carmichael
The name of the woman lying next to me is Jennifer or Janine, I’m not sure which. We met at the grocery no more than two hours ago. She stood in line behind me and placed her items on the belt with mine without using the plastic divider. It wasn’t until the cashier confused our items that she stepped in to clarify. There was a time when such an innocuous act wouldn’t have drawn my attention. In the past a woman would’ve had to look me in the eyes and spell it out in no uncertain terms. Jennifer or Janine smiled at me and shrugged. That was all it took. She followed me back to my place and let me undress her. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Midge Raymond
The vet tech’s name was Kristy, and she had a shrill, candied voice that grated on Monica’s nerves. Her husband, Louis, was the one who usually took the dog to the vet.
“Oh, poor baby,” Kristy crooned as she took the dog from Louis’s arms. “What happened to you?”
“She had a seizure,” Louis said. He started to follow them into the back, but another tech intercepted him.
“If you can just fill out these forms,” she said, “we can get started on treatment right away. What happened exactly?”
Filed under Fiction
by Kristen N. Arnett
The cousins gathered acorns beneath the wide canopy of oak trees, filling up the pockets of their shirts and pants until they bulged open. Though there were hundreds carpeting the ground behind their grandparents’ house, they kept only the unblemished ones, tossing out any that were punctured or hollow. They pried off the acorn’s caps and rubbed their thumbs across the smooth surfaces. Sometimes they broke them open and poked at the swollen orange kernels, imagining what it would be like to eat them. The kids did this every summer, and their parents had done it before them. The grandparents had owned the house for over thirty years. It sat in the middle of a large suburban neighborhood, but before the other houses had sprouted up, there’d been orange groves bordered by patchy dirt roads and fields full of wild grasses. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 