“…classy, sassy lassie seeks edgy guy with ambition. Must like a blonde her therapist calls ‘a lot of woman’ …” Craigslist New York

Movies in the Basement 
by Mary Valle 

Ironing is a really big deal for me. It's not only a chore, it's a discipline. It's a way of life. It's an upcoming bestselling heartwarming book where someone buys the farm early and someone else is super touched remembering what an asshole that person was. It's going to be written by me, about me, and I will somehow narrate it posthumously.
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IN UTERO 
This ‘I’ was once an IT in love. A disgusting, bitter, whined-out something. But with a maker, a beginning, some kind of mother. Before bleach and dead cells there was a blanket that held warm. And before that, muffled sounds of quiet desperation, haunting still as lonely breezes, bubbling the grass at slit precipice.

Three long horns from a cruise ship leaving
Voyagers settling in to "Happy Days Are Here Again"
And a hamburger buffet

Blue. Every morning, Wendy saw blue. She woke up in front of a large painting of a sun setting on the ocean. She had nailed it to her ceiling so she could stare at it when her eyes opened. She kept her windows open so she could listen to the waves whisper to each other outside her apartment. She would sit up without hitting her alarm clock because she had long ago decided that she needed its full minute of panicked blaring to reorient herself.

Hot embers cracked, popped and snapped in the grid-iron grate and sent a furious burst of sparks that quickly ignited adjacent seasoned logs (strategically situated in the behemoth Benjamin Franklin fireplace) and provided an immediate glow and warmth to the make shift maternity ward!

Ironing is a really big deal for me. It's not only a chore, it's a discipline. It's a way of life. It's an upcoming bestselling heartwarming book where someone buys the farm early and someone else is super touched remembering what an asshole that person was. It's going to be written by me, about me, and I will somehow narrate it posthumously.

A Place on the Wall by E.A. Mayer

TUNK is sitting on the ragged stump of a pine tree split by lightning when he hears Griff and his buddies drive down the narrow fire road in two cars; they jounce over chuckholes, slap spruce limbs. Griff and a man dressed in tree-bark camouflage get out of a blue Jeepish thing. Five other men tumble out of a low-slung foreign car like circus clowns.
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Sitting here…caught up in the world wind of gustily made decisions and all these little bruises…wondering whether I should be completely unreasonable or just moderately unavailable for comment at said time.

How could I continue to dupe those around me? These fellows of esteem – and of course Marlow, sitting peacefully as the blaring light from The Chapman (1) lit his quietly miserable outline. We were alone, so it seemed, no souls in sight nor sound could see the grief-swept anguish to which my features alluded.

“Good afternoon Mr. Oldman, I brought you your lunch.”

With the passing of the years, and thanks to attentive observation of his clients, Doctor Salvador Uriburu had discovered that the majority of the population of Calataid lacked the European origin of which it boasted. In its eyes, in its hands, persisted the African slaves who repaired the walls in the nineteenth century, and surely the older slaves who built the wells in the times of Garama.

The lights in the hallway flickered in a cryptic rhythm, reflecting off the puddles on the floor as well as the drips that fed them. Every flicker sent a shudder through my being, every drip, a twitch. My brain was experiencing some kind of electric impulse-tic reaction to external stimuli. I was unable to take any shortcuts through the winding canyons of my thoughts; long winded explanations filled my mind, being faced with these sensations. I now know it was merely intense fear, manifested through instinctual physical reflexes.

Tunk is sitting on the ragged stump of a pine tree split by lightning when he hears Griff and his buddies drive down the narrow fire road in two cars; they jounce over chuckholes, slap spruce limbs. Griff and a man dressed in tree-bark camouflage get out of a blue Jeepish thing. Five other men tumble out of a low-slung foreign car like circus clowns.