The Beautiful Bird Sits No Longer Singing in the Nest

by Kate Lechler

The hair-pulling is a habit recently acquired. I do it only when I’m alone, after Grace has left for the evening. I roll each hair between my fingers like a rosary. My fingers crawl across my scalp until I find one: coarse where the others are thin, kinked where the others are smooth. I enjoy the feel of it pulling against me, tenting my skin. Then I yank it out, suck on the end, and drop it on the floor. The area around my bed is littered with black straw.

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Thundergod in Therapy

by Effie Seiberg

Zeus sat on his shitty beige sofa in his shitty beige condo in his shitty beige retirement community. This was what the Court-appointed therapist had recommended—to think of this parole as a fresh start, and to enjoy retirement on Earth. Everything around him was fucking beige except for the fake plant from Ikea, which was a mocking shade of unnatural green. He could imagine the smug grin his judge would have if she’d seen this—

But no, he would give this a fair try. He’d promised Dr. Brinkman (formerly Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries) that he would.

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Wolfy Things

by Erin Roberts

Tonight, me and Lee gonna kill the wolf. Been digging a pit out in the woods all summer, filling it up with wolfsbane and sharp rocks big as our heads, covering it up with leaves so wolfy eyes can’t tell it’s there. Lee even snatched a whole chicken outta his Pa’s coop, snapped its neck and threw it on the pile like some kinda wolf Christmas come early. Wolf just has to go sniffing over by the edge and we give a good push and we’ll be Nicky and Lee, honest-to-God wolf-killers.

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Hatyasin

by Rati Mehrotra

Friday was the last good day. On Saturday the hunters came and by Tuesday Mira was gone, swallowed in the maw of the crowd fleeing Chandipur.

Mira my older sister, the normal one. I look up at the stars glittering in the sky and pray that she is safe.

Why did they come? Chandipur is as far as it gets from the heart of the New World. Perhaps the capital wants to stamp out the border communities, make sure that the taint of the old blood never spreads. The taint I’ve lived with all my life.

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The Saint of the Sidewalks

by Kat Howard

Joan wrote her prayer with a half-used tube of Chanel Vamp that she had found discarded at the 34^th St. subway stop. It glided across the cardboard – the flip side of a Stoli box, torn and bent – and left her words in a glossy slick the color of dried blood: “I need a miracle.”

You were supposed to be specific when asking the Saint of the Sidewalks for an intervention, but everything in her life was such a fucking disaster, Joan didn’t know where to start. So, she asked for a miracle, non-specific variety.

She set her cardboard on the sidewalk, prayer-side up. Then lit the required cigarette – stolen out of the pack of some guy who had been hitting on her at a bar – with the almost empty lighter she had fished out of the trash. You couldn’t use anything new, anything you had previously owned, in your prayer. That was the way the devotion worked: found objects. Discards. Detritus made holy by the power of the saint.

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The Husband Stitch

by Carmen Maria Machado

(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:

Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.

The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.

My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.

My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.

All other women: interchangeable with my own.)

In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbor’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbor’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.

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The Lady’s Maid

by Carlea Holl-Jensen

Sometimes she wonders about the girls whose heads her mistress wears. Sometimes, though not often, she wonders where they came from, who they loved. She wonders who, if anyone, keeps their memory now.

Mostly, though, she doesn’t trouble herself. It is her lady’s right to take what she desires. Everything is hers, as far as the eye can see: the mirrored sitting room and the marble statues in the courtyard and the deer in the forests to the east and the endless farmland, now fallow, to the west—all hers. Any passing milkmaid with a handsome head of curls, any traveling fortuneteller with changeable sea-green eyes—they are all hers, too, if she wishes it. This is the order of things.