Fiction
by Fiona Ennis.
“She was being tugged somewhere unearthly, towards a radiant light source, the same colour as those long fluorescent white lights that buzzed in the kitchen in the convent.”
After all the pain and blood, you almost begin to think of death as the next therapy, because that’s what it is, you realize. Death is part of the process.
by Sarah Yahm
The ants in her foot went back to work digging tunnels and palaces and palazzos. She willed them to leave but they lingered and malingered and trespassed.
Lydia dreamt, too. She dreamt of Carnivale, of the motorcade, motorcycles without mufflers and pickup trucks hung with paper cutouts circling the island.
Even numbers are smooth and sweet, and can all be divided by two, which is the most perfect number of all because two means love: husband and wife, mother and child, man and dog. That should be obvious to anyone.
At what point, I wonder, does a person say enough is enough? I can’t go through with this; I didn’t pick the ending I’ve been given. I would dearly love to keep the next few years of my life.
On Slim Fast nights you go to bed with a hollow ache in your gut that keeps you awake well past your bedtime, but it’s okay. You know you could’ve starved on the streets of Korea. They tell you this all the time, so you try to be grateful that, at least, you had something.
During the week we have left in Hawaii, Liz occasionally mentions that maybe I should go back to the hospital to see my father, and I say no, and she says family is important, and then neither of us says anything for a while. My dad has managed to ruin the trip.
Mornings, Adam struggles up from his dreams to a blinding, ochre-tinged pain that sizzles up his damaged spine, seizes his neck, etches spiteful hieroglyphics into the base of his skull. He can’t help groaning but he does it quietly, because Rosie works third shift and needs her sleep. Before he hurt his back, he didn’t understand that pain is another person who travels with you…