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Cheryl Snell
Thoughts in the Time of Collision
I am all hair, glittering with diamond-glass. A forehead streaked with blood, rubies and roses crisscrossing the tangerine flaps of a ripped collar. Ripped skin. The air is blue and then bluer and then green and then black. Black is absence of color, white the sum. When I come to, a mangled fender dangles halfway through the windshield, inches from my face. When he sees it, my brother bursts into big pearly tears. Why is his arm on wrong? He is all geometry. Triangles and spinning circles. Mouth an oblong of cries. He was never the brave type and I don’t know where to look except into my own reflection, bleeding in the overhead mirror. I lift the visor high and watch the patterns of trickle. They fascinate me more than the fantasy of rescue. It’s in the way the tributaries join together at my chin. The way they drip off it like a cliff. How they spill drop by drop into the valley between my breasts.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has or will appear in On the Seawall, Midway, Rogue Agent, Blue Unicorn, 100 Word Story, and the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology.
Ervin Brown for Day three of our Invisible and Visible Disabilities feature and for the last day of Autism Acceptance month
I ran to the gym instructor, a tall man. He had a bumpkin’s voice and wore a jersey like he played football. He leaned against the school wall with his buddies. I tugged at his arm and pointed at the boy who wouldn’t leave me alone, but he waved me off. This was not the first time I had been bullied for my autism.
I walked past the playground into a wooded area, trekking along the fence line until I reached the opposite end of the schoolyard. This spot is where the yard spilled into the main road. I took one step off the grass and felt a rainbow of delight explode from my chest. I was no longer on school property.
Alison Wassell
Evelyn Battersby was a difficult woman to please, an easy one to disappoint. When her children brought their gifts on silver salvers she would sniff, wrinkle her nose, send them back to the kitchen.
Kayleigh Kitt
Henry leafed through the applications on his desk, sighed, picking up the first one.
Application no. 56/438/b
Activity/Description: Cheese rolling. A large rinded cheese placed at the top of a hill. . .
Theo Stone
Into the Hills
. . . Every day he would wake up and rearrange his sense of self, renew his memories of the world before, and head back into routine in order to make the next paycheck. . .
From the Archives: Chaucer Cameron on Halloween
Sunday afternoon there’s always roast dinner. Then mum and dad go to church. The twins stay and wash dishes. Elder-twin picks up a plastic bag with unused Brussels sprouts inside. The cellar door is open.
Arthur Mandal
Childhood’s Cave The worst times were Thursdays. They were the weekly meetings, when things were assigned, calculated, declared. A reprimand or an insult always brought her father home in the worst of moods. Her mother, on edge, the frozen mask of...
Bethany W Pope
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Daniel Addercouth
Two Halves You won’t want to take the locket, but your twin sister Agnes will insist, pressing it into your hand as she stands on the doorstep of your cottage, unwilling to enter. You’re supposed to take turns looking after it, changing each...
James Young
Quince There is a quince tree in the Alice Munro short story The Moons of Jupiter, and also in the poem “Lunch With Pancho Villa” by Paul Muldoon. In the novel The Love of Singular Men, by the Brazilian author Victor Heringer, a mother beats her...