Octavia, for her part, has been ruminating about the girls all day. She’s sure they are up to something. She’s had experience with raising girls and none of it has been good. Today, she sits at her kitchen table mumbling over cups of hot cafe Bustello con leche. Girls! They are the spawn of the devil. Why hadn’t God blessed her with sons instead of daughters?
Something was happening with the crows. That something was making Stella uneasy.
Fitzgerald puffs on the breeze slipping through his window. A scent of plowed earth tagged to the air teases him. His mouth waters from its heaviness, the mineral taste flirting with his hopes that the clouds might gather closing out the hard blue skies and moulding the shattered summer ground into one again.
“I’m very sorry about that. Hello, barista, help here, please.” Mulgren’s voice carried across the place. She was used to being waited on. I wondered if the hulk waited on her. I openly stared at his crotch again.
What’s happening in my Human Sexuality class at 8:30 at night is: over-sharing.
“The textbook is wrong, not all men experience the refractory period,” somebody says. “I orgasm five or six times a night without needing a break.”
There had been a time when Jim was not the senator, not the governor, not the President. Outside the window, the sky was a flat, endless blue above sand and curling waves that moved in and out, daily and forever. Marine One had flown the family for this vacation, and now the weekend was over. Three birds kited on the winds. To a child it would seem as if the birds were delighting in freedom and skill, but Jim supposed the birds were constantly circling for crabs and small fish. The gulls screeched. When he was a child he put his arms out straight from his shoulders as if to fly. His grandfather had taken him to Gull Lake and thrown breadcrumbs on the water. When the gulls flocked to the bread, his grandfather aimed his shotgun at the hungry creatures, the crack of the shotgun staying in Jim’s memory. “Don’t like those dirty birds,” his grandfather muttered.
There is nothing more blissful than the all-encompassing peace of being one, literally one, with your body, and sharing it with no shadow at all.
As most of our readers are writers themselves, you will understand the special satisfaction of having your work selected out of a field of dozens of other entries. The stories below represent the best entries that we received as a part of our 2013 Summer Short Fiction Contest. The theme itself was summer, and the winners were selected by Editor-in-Chief Matthew Guerruckey and Fiction Editor Pamela Langley.
“Well I guess that’s it. Everything’s in order,” he said to his wife who sat across from him at the kitchen table. It was a goal they’d strived for since marriage, one that consumed their every day and now they had achieved it: the weight of all their worries was now off their shoulders. “We have all of our bills together. All of our debt is paid off. We’ve both secured tenure at the school. Would have to touch a kid to lose that.”
For once his textbook English wasn’t charming. The slide was refusing to lift into its tilted position, meaning they’d be unable to demonstrate displacement volume and surge force using the country’s most advanced tsunami wave simulator. Eva heard the hoots already, saw the world-weary eye-rolls.