Recoil

by Trenton Streeting

We were perched in my father’s truck at the top of our cabin driveway, a couple of miles above Canandaigua Lake and the other western Finger Lakes. I looked out at the drifts of lake-effect snow that had blown off Ontario and had filled in whole valleys of knotted vineyards below, not to mention our tracks down the rocky drive.

I was eight years old and it was our day to work on the cabin together. Earlier, after my father’s disk sander had whirred to a halt, he turned to me and gestured majestically. “Matthew, the work is always the best pay.” He often declared things like this, which was an indication of the type of money I could expect to earn in the years to come.

Sisters

by Sheila Kohler

It was snowing, the big damp flakes falling quietly, strangely, on the dark fir trees, when my sister first mentioned the name of the man who would kill her. We were in New Haven, Connecticut, in the new, tall apartment building, where my first baby was born. We were nineteen years old, my husband and I, and my sister, Maxine, who was twenty-one, had come to be with me for this birth. We watched the snow fall slowly from a ghostly sky and my baby suck on my breast, with equal wonder. Neither my sister nor I were used to new babies, or snow.

The Christmas Patient

by John Kay

Blood draws dissolve into Christmas lights,
veins dizzy with the latest medications.

Then alone on a street of dusty lava lamps,
eating baklava with freezing fingers, half—

understanding why my mind can’t breathe,
betrayed by the bad apostle in my blood.

Bows of breath and diamond bright watches,
sticky faces, burnt chestnuts, glitter on glitter.

I find a cheap jewelry stand outside Kaufhauf
and buy a necklace for my wife. Walking back,

I cry—thinking, now, that I may have to die,
the little bag in my hand rattling like a bad lung.