With a gravitational sense of exhaustion, Heather puts her machine to sleep and wheels herself back from the white desk in the grey cubical. She sits shut-eyed for a moment, feels crazed, resists an urge to slam her coffee mug through the black screen.
9:11 p.m. as her head rises above the partitions separating the other cubicles, most of which are still occupied with foreheads reflecting the shine of monitors. Maree is in the adjacent box and she doesn’t notice as Heather stares down at her. Maree’s eyes are bloodshot and her mousy hair frayed and dry from the air conditioning. Her face seems barely held together by thick makeup.
“You nearly done?” says Heather.
Maree starts a little and looks up with a horrible unchanged expression of emptiness, and then her eyes blink a few times, registering the human form.…
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1
Dearest Bob,
I’m having a lovely time at Clockworld. At noon yesterday, three hundred grandfather clocks chimed at once. I had to cover my ears, it was so loud. They have clock-themed books, analog and digital clocks, and an entire room dedicated to Mickey Mouse watches. They even have pocket watches like the one your grandfather used to carry. I considered buying you one, but decided against it.
I know you forbade me to bring another clock home, but I did. I did it for me.
Love,
Margaret …
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“How long will I live?”
The doctor’s office is painted sickly green, and the fluorescents above make it only look sicker. The doctor himself has a tie with cartoons on it, lurid yellow and bright red, that draws Theo’s eyes even after he’s asked the question that has weighed on his mind for so long.
“Well.” The doctor looks up into his brain for the answer, finding only the ammunition for a dozen or so questions. “Do you smoke? Do you drink? Are you sexually active? Do you exercise? How many hours a week? Do you sleep well? Do you like yourself? Do you drive a nice car? Who are you dating? Do they have dyed hair? How much red meat do you eat every week?”…
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the sun licks brittle leaves,
golden shiver of revelation.
the lies I told myself pierce
this vale, our decayed gulf
stark yellow now.
cold resolution quickens,
birdless horizon unveiled,
shadows on clouded eyes.
breath leaves in spirals, blooming
chill tendrils along obscure paths.
flickering cressets now naked and unhooded,
blurred tales raked aside, false and fallen.
look: here
the stories of trees and stones, moss and salt;
a book of signs, sigils written with rain–
these were never hidden.
bared truth beneath a smile’s distraction;
there, waiting beside remembered footprints,
calling across the clearing between us
in the dying sunlight.
– Fritz Eifrig…
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My neighbor is a spider farmer. Spiders settle on the plants by his living room window. “I’m harvesting their silk,” he explains. “It’s as strong as steel.”
“What will you build?”
“A shield over my heart. A patch over the hole in the sky.” His wife had been high up in the Towers. He points at the bare skyline out the window. “I’ll drape a web over the city that will blind the sky with its own sunlight, so the next plane will splinter against the wall of webs.” He scratches his head. “Or a parachute to jump from the next burning building. Do you know that many spiders can make parachutes?”
I don’t know this. I watch a spider parachute from his ceiling. If I squint closely, it looks like a tiny lady falling from the sky.…
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Glen Phillips is the publisher of Front Porch Review, a quarterly online literary magazine based in IL.
Please describe your website and your duties as editor/writer.
Front Porch Review is an online literary journal whose intended audience is the older members of our population and whose contributors have, in the most part come late to the creativity game. I act as editor and publisher, improving the approved submissions when necessary (the misuse of basic punctuation is appalling) and then alerting its avid readers to its availability on a quarterly basis.
Tell us about your career.
I toiled in the vineyards of educational and IT publishing as editor, writer, product designer, subject matter expert, business manager, and other menial roles not worth mentioning. After forty years of such effort, I decided that the best I could do for the common good was to build an electronic front porch.…
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Sometimes when I close my eyes
The landscape dissolves
And I am two-thirds the wind
And one-third a boy in the city.
You will find me among
The high-rises hiding leaves
In dim-lit corners,
Pulling the fire-alarms
And filling the halls
With painted flames.
You’d be scared
If they weren’t the color
Of bad ideas,
The ill-planned blues
That are easily distinguishable
From real ceruleans.
But still, plastic or not,
I am incredibly happy.
Beneath these trees
I never accomplish anything,
And I haven’t moved
In thirty years.
– Seth Jani…
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