Our house is not big. I used to like the closeness of it all. Each day I leave to walk the quiet streets of our neighborhood. Sirens are the most common sound these days. I haven’t been keeping count but I easily hear them twice as often as before. Now is the time of year when I can usually hear kids squealing from many yards and have to remind myself that this is the noise children make when they play but also when they’re in trouble. It always makes me uneasy. I think I prefer that unease to this particular quiet. Sometimes I see people and dogs stare at me from their windows. I am not breaking the rules. I don’t have a dog, one of the legitimate reasons people have to leave their houses; a necessity as defined by the city.…
a lot of what i became was the moon: a reflection of someone else’s light, the glow in the dark, masked behind the bramble— it’s like discovering my fabric is made of the night sky and that it can never change that the cape i use to float in the wind is made of the stars and constellations but that everyone is asleep and indoors when it takes hover but if the evening could transform to what image does it become am i even myself if i am not a satellite “we wouldn’t see the meteor showers or the fireworks if not for the dark” we wouldn’t know gleam if not for gloom then what is the moon for what is the moon for what is the moon
After Gabriel García Márquez died, I picked up my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera – or rather your copy, since your name is still written on the first page. For years, the book’s been a permanent fixture on my shelf; until yesterday, I forgot how it ever appeared.
You may not remember, but you gave me the book for my birthday, a day I hated and which I still hate, even though I have, in my old age, resigned myself to the fact that birthdays are like funerals – events which the guests require but which the person of honour would be just as happy to avoid. I never liked to talk about my birthday but somehow you got it out of me, which was a talent you had.…
Newly Edited for 21stCentury Technological Phenomena
Room Décor, Chronology of
The daughter’s bedroom will undergo a series of very definite changes indicating the passage of time and the gradual estrangement of the daughter’s identity from your own. She collects horse figurines—expensive, painted things with spindly legs that always snap—and the interest makes Christmases and birthdays easy. You spend a week in the garage building the shelves where the creatures can live, and years later, after the horses have all gathered dust, you find her wrapping their super-glued, taped-up limbs in old t-shirts and storing them away for good.
Her room is painted over too many times to remember, favorite color under favorite color until she can find a permanent answer to the question, and you’re sure she never will.…
By Jordan Blum, Holly Rae Garcia, and Ryan Prentice Garcia
Posted on
Ryan Prentice Garcia & Holly Rae Garcia
Holly Rae Garcia and Ryan Prentice Garcia are a sort of power couple in the creative writing world. They live on the Texas Coast and their new novella, The Easton Falls Massacre: Bigfoot’s Revenge, just came out on October 30th. Holly is a corporate photographer by day and the Editor-at-Large and Art Director at Versification Magazine. Some of her favorite authors include Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Keyes, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. Her debut novel, Come Join the Murder, was released this past March by Close To The Bone Publishing. Ryan works in construction and his most prized possession is a Kane Hodder autographed Jason Voorhees mask. He calls himself a “military brat” and he’s lived in Germany, Turkey, and Belgium.…
What I wouldn’t give for another morning like that one:
I brought you Kona coffee and sunny-side-up eggs, pausing momentarily at the bedroom door, teak tray perched on my fingertips, to watch you float on the rippling blue comforter, a still life, swimming a statuesque side-stroke. The birds in the branches outside our bedroom window capered about in the yellow-breasted sunlight. The maple tree, wrapped in wet brown bark, sprouted buds bejeweled by last night’s fog— the same little beads which slid down your naked skin in the shower, dawn after presumptive dawn.
I sip my coffee alone now, in the first anodyne rays of the mourning hours, measuring my life in birdsong–plaintive and palliative.
