by Zach Murphy
The cicadas are extremely loud this summer, and so are my mother’s outfits. The leopard print high-heels, the oversized sunglasses, and the hat with the pink floral arrangement on its brim are some of the more understated pieces in her wardrobe.
“You don’t hear about the sun when it’s behind the clouds,” she once told me as she put her beet-red lipstick on in the mirror. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Bastet Zyla
Dinah’s mother had only passed but two days ago, and here she was going through her attic all alone, to decide how to best proceed with a livelihood left behind.
Dinah’s younger brother had been gone since her adolescence– leukemia. While her oldest brother was stationed somewhere in the Middle East and couldn’t make it to the funeral (that is, if he had even gotten news of her death). She couldn’t tell you exactly where he was located, as he never wrote to anyone but his wife all the way down in Georgia. So with no other remaining siblings alive or present, Dinah was left to manage her late mother’s affairs singlehandedly. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction, Young Writers Edition
by April Bannister
When her heart buys its ticket and packs its suitcase and settles in its window seat to watch the airplane heave up from the soil, she is at home—she has not yet laid in her hospital bed, nor stepped on an airplane herself. When her heart buys its ticket, she feels it, chloroform cold radiating from inside her chest. She panics. Hands clutch at something too deep to grasp, so she flails, alone in her bedroom, alone in the apartment. I can’t die yet, she thinks. There’s so much food I need to eat. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction, Young Writers Edition
by Ryan White
Within two years, Alice Sellers had lost her cat, Kevin, and her lifelong companion, Ruth. She would’ve given anything to get them back. But no such bargain could be had, so she wanted revenge. And since there was no revenge against hemorrhagic stroke, Alice’s last hope was killing the coyote that’d eaten Kevin five nights previous. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Abbie Doll
She woke up to a mountain range in her mouth.
Such an awe-inspiring sight caught her by surprise, despite the numbing weight of her still-present drowsiness. She stood there gawking at her reflection, bewildered by the distinctly Himalayan scene sprouting from her mandible crust. A series of jagged, panicky exhalations fogged up the glass, while her minty-mist breath worked to sculpt a pleasant-yet-bleak bathroom atmosphere. The air felt thinner somehow, and the landscape of her mind felt just as clouded, just as inaccessible as the sky-piercing peaks she saw there in the mirror. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 