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Take Me Disappearing

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Stan Werlin

Today is not one of Harold’s better days. He’s fed up with Susan again. “You just stand there in the corner all day!” he shouts when she appears, which is pretty much a result of whatever’s going on in Harold’s mind at any given time. “Talk to me!” he commands. “Why won’t you talk to me?” It relaxes him to see her and he yearns to fall into the comfortable cadences they had for the ten years they were married before she died. When it doesn’t happen, he becomes frustrated and angry the way he is today.

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Point of Departure, Point of Return

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Kathryn O'Day

If you ever happen to be in St. Louis, and you take Highway 40 to the western edge of the city, you will spy, looming above the Clayton Road exit, the world’s largest Amoco sign. Forty feet tall, sixty feet wide, the sign is so big and so bright that, according to local legend, pilots once used it to guide their flights in and out of Lambert Field.

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Season of Healing

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Maria Angeline Pennacchi

One would think seeing red flags in a relationship would make a logical, intelligent person walk away. But in the mirage, sweet temporary moments and beautiful, empty promises keep a sensitive, people-pleasing, empathetic soul hanging on. One begins to romanticize the situation, seeing the red flags as something to be fixed with patience and extra love. Feeling the “right” thing to do is prove unwavering love, loyalty and strength to ultimately win the prize of earning reciprocation.

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Letter to Tom McDowell from Michigan

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Barry Kitterman

Dear Tom,
When we met all those years ago in Belize, we were doing the Lord’s work, though few of us in that outfit were people of faith. We were working in the Lord’s vineyards and also drinking in the vineyards and having love affairs in the vineyards and generally thinking too highly of ourselves in the vineyards and away from the vineyards.

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The Hot Sauce Man

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Quin Yen

Andrea met him nine years ago. She doesn’t remember his name. Was it Mr. Barnes, or Baker, or Bennett? Something that begins with a B. She calls him The Hot Sauce Man.
June 4th Monday (2016)
Andrea drives her yellow Toyota Corolla, a second-hand sedan to the hospital. She parks it. Half of the parking lot is still empty. She walks fast with light steps as if she were floating. Her ponytail in the back flaps.
In three weeks, Andrea will start a new job, a real doctor’s six-figure paying job. At the age of thirty, she feels she has spent all her life in schools and residency training. It’s about time to make a living. The thought of this makes her heartbeat quicken.

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Peaches and Pits

In Issue 96, June 2025 by J.C. Ambrose

The Hare Krishnas would be coming out in good time to sing and dance for everyone and everything. I was eight in the summer of 1985, vacationing with my silent generation relatives in Ocean City, MD, in an apartment on First St. at The Haven Hotel. Poppy knew how much I loved to sing and dance. He got some bells.

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The Peace, Love, and Coffee Café

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Margaret Sayers

In her thirty-two years, Claudette had managed to date one man who might just have been the one. Charlie was a boyishly handsome, fun-loving, fully employed, and emotionally stable paralegal in a big firm working his way through law school at night at Oklahoma City University. The couple dated for about a year and were talking about moving in together when Charlie unexpectedly stopped by the apartment Claudette shared with her mother.

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Love in the Time of Rising Rent

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Kelvin Kim

At eight thirty on a Tuesday morning, without warning, my love for Esme was evicted by her landlord.
I first met Esme at an outdoor wine bar in Bed-Stuy. A surprising chill had settled that summer night. From the far end of the backyard, my eyes glanced over my untouched glass of white wine, tracing the path of two intersecting string lights, until I saw her

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Ghost Notes

In Issue 96, June 2025 by David Sheridan

You don’t know me, but if you’re of a certain age, it is very likely that there is a connection between us — a way in which I am a part of you. I want to tell the story of how that came to be, how some amateurs messing around in the backroom of a low-rent novelty store ended up producing a brief national sensation. This is the story of a band from the Detroit suburbs called 24 Radiant Green Umbrellas. This is the story of their accidental hit song — “Strike Anywhere” — which crept onto the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1989. And most of all, this is the story of a drum fill that occurs at precisely two minutes and thirty-five seconds into the song.

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All A Lot of Oysters

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Ryan Michelle Day

I turned twenty-five sometime around five p.m. on August 15th in a five-star restaurant overlooking the marina about seven hours into my thirteen-hour double-shift, and the sun was already setting behind the boats in the harbor casting a golden glow in the main dining room that I knew would turn lavender and then cobalt blue before the windows would become mirrors lit up only by the glow within, and in their reflection I would see five years wasted in this place seating expensively dressed guests at tables I no longer had a seat at…

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My Mother’s Armor

In Issue 96, June 2025 by Andrew Sarewitz

When I was very young, I went with my mother to a boutique in Short Hills, New Jersey, where she purchased two or three dresses. As I think back, there is one I thought of as special. I can still picture her wearing it. If I remember accurately, it was multicolored in soft blue and silver two-inch metallic squares, stitched together.