THE TROUBLE DOGS GET INTO

It’s the way she said it, stirring her coffee, syrup sprawling over her buttered pancakes. The way she said it got me more than what she said. What she said, in her voice, heavy and certain as iron skillets, what she said was, “I told him it don’t matter y’all didn’t plan it. Her instincts’ll kick in. She’ll take care of her own.” A flapjack crumble bobbled in her cheek dimple as she spoke, leaning forward on sticky elbows.

My empty stomach puckered. My fingertips remembered newborn skin. I hadn’t been trying to eavesdrop; I’d just stopped by to top off their coffees. I excused myself, slumping past the restaurant kitchen to the employee restroom. Here, the scent of chlorine bleach arm-wrestled bacon grease.

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TEASPOONS, SOCKS, AND MISSING CHILDREN

Yesterday I bought six teaspoons in Sainsbury’s for one-pound-twenty a pack. They’re those cheap ones, thin, weightless, barely suitable for stirring tea and definitely not sturdy enough for flapjack and custard. It was unusually sunny for March and I had to take off my scarf, which I left in the trolley and realised too late to go back and get it. My mouth ached because I’d watched Russell Howard the night before and couldn’t sleep for laughing; he has a way of looking at the world that makes you love and hate it in equal measure. I hadn’t gone searching supermarkets for spoons, even though ours have been disappearing recently.

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LADIES SPECIAL

The one-eyed woman only came when there was a question to be answered. She would answer it, if the person in doubt desired illumination.

The one-eyed woman boarded trains seeking those in need, for people in motion often had questions. One had to wait patiently for her providence; if not, she would turn away and the question would forever go unanswered.

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Congratulations to Dawn Sperber of Santa Fe, NM. Winner of our June Student Choice Contest.

WISH ON THE RING’S EYE

A RING, swaying on a strand of hair, high in a tree, hits against the trunk and makes a –ting. The blond knot unwinds, and the silver ring slips free. It’s falling …

Yesterday little Isobel, that faithful dreamer, that trying girl, carried the ring up to the tree’s top. On the highest thick branch, she sat dandling the ring on a strand of her hair, just swaying it back and forth like her own hypnotism. At dusk, putting her lips to the eye of the ring, she gave a kiss, and cast a wish that came through her like light through a keyhole. She imagined life passing as potently as it did while in the tree. She saw herself as a sun queen.

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TIMOTHY LEARY’S DEAD

When I was eight I understood pig Latin perfectly well. All children in my family did, as do, perhaps, all children everywhere. Nonetheless, my relatives were in the habit of using pig Latin when they wanted to have “adults only” conversations while children were present. We knew not to let on that we understood. It was our unspoken law, a way of being kind to the grownups.

On January 1, 1976, I broke this law.

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HOW TO BE A GOOD PRISONER

The dungeon cell smelled awful. Helmut tossed hay from his bedding nest onto the shit in the back corner, then returned to his side of the kennel-size space and sat. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, everything but the iron bars was cobbled from black, rounded stones that gleamed with cold sweat. Helmut felt the stones like knuckles that jabbed into his pelvis, poked at his spine. As he repositioned himself, his eyes strayed toward Bowden, a thick-bellied man with a nose covered in red veins like the stitching on a wine sack. For the past two weeks Bowden had been Helmut’s cellmate. He lay face down near the bars.

The floor gently sloped toward the bars, and Helmut watched a trickle leave the back corner wend between the stones, and pool against Bowden’s cheek.

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ORION

It was a cool, cloudless night. I was outdoors and far from the city. My back lay against weeds, the kind that looked like flowers. They were brittle from an early frost and crunched as I squirmed.

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