kArA-Redwing

In a forgotten attic, in a quaint little home, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, lies a thick journal. It was not there yesterday. It will not be there tomorrow. But, for tonight, adorned in its best velvet dust jacket, it awaits its next entry. Half of its yellowed pages are already full of thoughts and dreams. Always exactly one half. Every night it makes the careful decision whether to ignore the entry presented to it or assimilate it. Assimilation is no simple task. The journal must painstakingly unwind its binding. Sift through the dear memories it already collected. Choose one to extinguish. That part is always difficult. Picking the page to lose. To erase. The book is dreadfully cursed with both an indulgent nostalgia and a hunger for the new, the fresh, the invigorating. It wishes it was satisfied to see the new entries and let them go. To keep its existing collection intact. Or to at least be able to fill its blank pages. To be complete. To stop seeking

Behind the door to my closet is another door that should not be there. I know it leads to the attic, because of where it is in the house. However, I have never found the other side of it. There is just a barren wall where it should be. The thing is, the attic seems too small on the inside. Once, I measured its dimensions. It was a few feet shy of what the floor plans told me to expect. The door does not exist on the floor plans for the little townhouse. I checked. Three times. I never open the door that should not be there. In fact, I stopped myself from even looking at it by keeping the closet shut. When I had moved in, before I realized that the door which should not be there could not exist, I had decided not to use the closet. I had few possessions, and my room was very large. Uncomfortably large. I wished I had noticed that when I toured the place. The set dressing of the open house had hidden that emptiness. The too much distance between my bed and the closet door.

My strongest memories of my grandfather are set in his back garden. Wildflowers, orchids, azaleas, natives, exotics, ferns, mosses, mushrooms, trees, and even the lichens on tree bark. Grandpa loved all of them and found a way to encourage even the most stubborn plant to thrive in his messy jungle paradise. Neighbors would stop to gawk at its beauty. They also mumbled under their breath about the wildflowers shedding seeds into the yards. And they did. Everyone’s lawn was speckled with purples and oranges and whites. Every summer of my childhood, that place was my getaway. My vacation. My second home. Naturally, it was where I ended up when I handed my husband the divorce papers. It was Mom’s idea for me to live with Grandpa. He was struggling to keep up his garden and his house by then. You can guess which he prioritized. Mom thought that it would be good for both of us if I moved in and helped. At least until they could convince him it was time to go into assisted

A tiny, squat spider crawled out of the brush into the late afternoon sun illuminating the back patio. It preferred these transitional spaces, where the natural world gave way to concrete and steel. Its four pairs of eyes processed the terrain. The bushes lining the house were already crowded with webs. The long stretches of featureless stone slabs were a brutal desert. The table and four chairs in the corner by the house were interesting though. Worth a closer look. Its legs skittered with precision. Across the emptiness. Up a textured metal chair leg. Over the plastic weave of the cushions. From the top of the chair back, the spider saw its new home. The diagonal distance between where it stood and the screen door was perfect. The web body would hover a foot over the bushes. A swarm of gnats congregated at just that height in another corner of the patio. Once they drifted this way. The spider would have food for weeks. No time to lose. The spider dabbed a new thread

Tom. An unremarkable name for an unremarkable man. Heavy set and balding, the once married and once divorced bachelor was heading into his mid-forties. Decades ago, ambition had taken him from the rural smalltown of his youth into the nearest city. His education and credentials held him back. Tied him to low skill jobs. But he found his niche. His thick frame and resting scowl made the otherwise shy, softspoken soul look intimidating. From his 20s through his 30s, he had been a bouncer. Pretending to be some tough guy had been fun. Sure, all the yelling hurt his throat, but there was a special pleasure in women thinking he was some strong, bad boy they could tame. It earned him a level of attention he never had back on the farm. One of those infatuations was beginning and end of his marriage. He was too old for the club scene now though. And good riddance. The grinding, shrill, discordant music the kids listened to these days grated on his nerves. He transitioned into the

The sky-blue Toyota corolla hatchback’s open trunk was stuffed to the brim. Two ten-gallon buckets containing nets, snorkeling gear, a diving flag, towels, and mesh bags. “Check.” A heavy metal boiling pot, a gallon of bleach, and a set of metal dental picks. “Check.” A suitcase holding 9 days’ worth of clothes, two swimsuits, and rash shirts. “Check.” A case of bottled water, a cooler with lunch meat, bread, and cheese, a box of granola bars, and a tin of cookies that was unlikely to survive the road trip. “Check and Check.” Gemma closed the trunk. Or tried to. It bounced back up the first time. Some extra oomph on the second attempt made it stick. She patted her baby’s rump with a deep, right-sided smile before climbing into the driver’s seat. Starting the engine, she clicked on her headlights and set up her favorite YouTube music playlist. An eclectic mix of pop, rap, jazz, and Spanish ballads. She pulled out of the parking spot and into the drive out of her apartment

I was six months into my new PhD Thesis. It was my fifth year in grad school. Starting over had not been my choice. Without my previous advisor to oversee my work, or rather to fund it while I did everything else, my old thesis died. No more culturing rat neurons. No more filling them with glowing proteins. No more videos of cells growing processes. Desperately trying to make connection with one another across the hard glass surface they adhered to. Then again, more often than not, my little movies were funereal. Overstimulated neurons from sick cultures beaded up into apoptosis under the heat and light from the microscope’s lasers. In death, they formed a fireworks display of red, green, and yellow. Beautiful in hindsight. Crushing on the day of shooting, when every movie I had recorded since 5am was wasted effort. To be honest, I was my third topic in that lab when it ended. During my rotation, I had followed a grad student and learned his project. Picked up the

Mr. Bradford lived a small, solitary life. Extravagancy never spoke to him, and his definition for “extravagant” was wider than most. For example, if it suited him, he could have afforded a mortgage on a reasonable home with a small yard. He would never make such a purchase. What business did a single man have in owning so much property? It was a waste. No. His modest unit was quite sufficient. Afterall, the point of a home was to hold one’s things and provide a safe place to sleep. His 500 square foot studio apartment did just that. It held his mattress, a desk with a TV, and a small kitchen. The lack of closets made storage a bit more difficult, but he had cardboard bankers boxes for that. He constructed a sort of dresser out of them and thought himself quite clever for it. The only items without a place were his baseball, bat, and glove. One day he would pick up the game again. Until then, his equipment would sit in the corner by the door, reminding him of his glory

A damp night in a forgotten alley on the outskirts of some bustling city. Streaming haze erupts from a jarred manhole. Distant honks from disgruntled drivers in need a drink, airing their frustrations with those who imbibed too much already. The gentle cooing of a mourning dove couple perched in a windowsill above. The journal of collected stories lies on the overturned lid of a metal trashcan. Its pages ruffle in the chilly air as if wheezing. Something is terribly wrong. The journal’s cover bloats with excess water. It should have been immune to this. It always had been. Whether visiting the muggiest rainforest or drifting through the ocean depths, its sheer will had provided an impervious shield. As long as it knew what was coming, it could protect itself from anything. Tonight, though, its demands that the chilly wet remain at bay went unheard. A safe place. A new location. It has to move. No clear haven comes to it. The fog in its sentience mirrors the thick cloud

Single mother Sophia struggled to open the door to her bungalow with one arm full of groceries and the other full of her two-year daughter, Amelia. Thankfully, the entryway led straight into the kitchen. The brown bag of bread, eggs, carrots, and all the other essentials ended up on the counter. Sophia quickly, but carefully, placed Amelia into her highchair. A quiet moan of discomfort came from her as she straightened her aching back. She felt too young for that kind of pain. A conflicted smile played across Sophia’s face as the little girl stared up at her. Dark eyes bright and inquisitive but also vacant. Amelia’s grandmother swore that Sophia had been out of the highchair by that age. That she was talking by then, albeit in nonsense phrases. Amelia was a silent child, only making a ruckus when she was truly hurt. She had babbled for a while when she was much younger. It had stopped suddenly, prematurely before her first birthday. The greater family had gathered for that