Worship

fiction by David Joseph

 Harper’s hands curl into each other as his tangled fingers acknowledge God’s presence and begin to pray.  His face is veiled by the sunlight filtering through the tinted glass that frames the congregation.  They are all on display.  Harper imagines they are fireflies.  Fireflies, proud to be airborne gems in the overcast night, the envy of all ants in the grass and all worms in the soil, the only stars closer to earth than the sun, the only ones anyone can touch.  They are fireflies, pursued and swung at and chased up and up and up by a curious child in mud-covered overalls and, one by one, captured in that stained-glass jar.  Then the jar is sealed.  You can’t fly in a sealed jar.  The mother had advised the child to make holes so that air could get in and out.  There are none.  Harper can’t breathe.

Corn Stalks

fiction by Rob Rotell

The sky is a clear, ashen blue, devoid of the faintest of clouds. The sun is blazing white, illuminating each emerald green ear of corn in the field that stretches for miles. The stalks wave lazily in the faint wind and a little brown-haired boy named Jacob is sweating through his flannel shirt, drenching it a dark maroon.

To:

poetry by Staci Eckenroth

Midnights dissolve into mid-mornings and

sleepless stumble. Through hours of fog,

driving down well-lit highways, they hope for

illusions that others are as forgotten in the blanketing

thick enough to blackout histories, like

memories of a boy’s body. Posed

in his casket while a girl in the corner steals

tissues and prayer cards, stuffing them in fistfuls

down her pockets. She keeps him as a reminder.

I ask, of what? She answers, of losing,

and fading scars from answers injected into

veins. My mother begs between inhales

of her cigarette, words hanging with smoke

trails: don’t ever do this to me.

But when sunlight spreads through maples, I

watch the sky move from black to purple to blue

like gradations of pixels. My grayscale eyes

knew these colors once, but now I only see cloud coverage

pushing the memory of his calloused fingertips

running over my hipbone from my mind. I still feel

the flutter of his eyelashes on my shoulder blade,

and goose bumps pimple across my skin

in waves of passion or loneliness

or misunderstanding. There was no note,

no one worth mentioning, but the sleepless

continue because we promised we would.

---

Staci Eckenroth is a senior creative writing major at Susquehanna University. She's obsessed with notebooks, the color yellow, and how memory works.  She has been previously published in RiverCraft, The Blue Route, and The Susquehanna Review.
 

Coming next week: fiction by Rob Rotell

A Letter to Anya, October 2009

nonfiction by Lauren Bailey
    

Anya, the temperature is dropping, and we’re not doing very well. At night we eat dinner in the cafeteria, and our friends watch every bite you put into your mouth. We smoke cigarettes on the patio beforehand, the uncomfortable outdoor furniture embedding diamond patterns into our arms and legs. Most nights, your eyes fill with tears. You tell me that our friends are all so obvious, that when we sit down to eat, they don’t even try to hide the fact that they’re watching you. I can tell, as you talk around exhales of smoke, that you don’t think I watch you. I can tell that you think I’m safe.