February/March 2017 | view this story as a .pdf By John Manderino Are you going to wear that?” Jill asked, brushing her hair, looking at Bob in her dressing table mirror. “I thought I might,” he said by the closet, buttoning. “Why? You don’t like it?” “Didn’t say...
Winterguide 2017
I was 22 when my girlfriend started noticing my hearing problem.
December 2016
Voila!” He presented the bouquet of red carnations with a flourish.
The floor drain between my legs was underneath a layer of ice. Craig and I had broken into an abandoned building on the darker edge of what may have been Skowhegan, and we decided to rest a while instead of continuing on in darkness.
We’d been playing pretend for almost a year and he still wouldn’t go back to his life. Meade wouldn’t acknowledge he had another life at all, though he’d bring me into it in ways, mentioning how Cole seemed to like me, driving me by the horse farm where he and Cole and his wife had lived before the great domestic unraveling commenced and she moved out to Deer Isle.
This is an excerpt from The Sadness, Benjamin Rybeck’s first novel. Rybeck is the marketing director at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub, among others. He lives in Houston, TX.
I breathe. “We’ve looked at houses in Kennebunk for six months.” I speak slowly, as if to a child. “Nothing is perfect. Or we can’t afford it. Our current home is old, lots of character. It’s our first house. We’ve been there for 24 years. Our children were born there.”
He was ten yards behind her when she heard him. In the cutaway on the back of her bathing suit he saw a braid of muscle tighten. He stopped and she turned to him, eyebrows arching as if only curious, her right hand moving in the L.L. Bean canvas bag hooked on her shoulder.
The shop lady explained that the little shepherd girl was in fact Bo Peep and that there wasn’t any mention of a shepherd boy in the rhyme, was there? And she even began to recite: “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep–”
He docked that frigid morning as a fog bank settled along the eastern reaches of Casco Bay.
Winterguide 2016 By Joan Connor We sit and drink, two good friends, in our forties now. We usually drink on Fridays after my husband has left our summer cottage on the island to take the ferry to the bus to the car to drive back to D.C. Diana is my best friend on the...
I began to collect books as soon as I could read, and I enjoyed reading so much I very early decided I wanted to be a writer, to my parents’ sorrow, for they wanted me to be a preacher like my father.
